The next few weeks were employed in taking Miss Mackenzie and Mrs. Burrup to the “Gorgon” on their way home.  It was a painful voyage to all—­to Dr. and Mrs. Livingstone, to Miss Mackenzie and Mrs. Burrup, and last, not least, to Captain Wilson, who had been separated so long from his ship, and had risked life, position, and everything, to do service to a cause which in spite of all he left at a much lower ebb.

When the “Pioneer” arrived at the bar, it found that owing to the weather the ship had been forced to leave the coast, and she did not return for a fortnight.  There was thus another long waiting from 17th March to 2d April.  Dr. and Mrs. Livingstone then returned to Shupanga.  The long detention in the most unhealthy season of the year, and when fever was at its height, was a sad, sad calamity.

We are now arrived at the last illness and the death of Mrs. Livingstone.  After she had parted from her husband at the Cape in the spring of 1858, she returned with her parents to Kuruman, and in November gave birth there to her youngest child, Anna Mary.  Thereafter she returned to Scotland to be near her other children.  Some of them were at school.  No comfortable home for them all could be formed, and though many friends were kind, the time was not a happy one.  Mrs. Livingstone’s desire to be with her husband was intense; not only the longings of an affectionate heart, and the necessity of taking counsel with him about the family, but the feeling that when over-shadowed by one whose faith was so strong her fluttering heart would regain, its steady tone, and she would be better able to help both him and the children, gave vehemence to this desire.  Her letters to her husband tell of much spiritual darkness; his replies were the very soul of tenderness and Christian earnestness.  Providence seemed to favor her wish; the vessel in which she sailed was preserved from imminent destruction, and she had the great happiness of finding her husband alive and well.

On the 21st of April Mrs. Livingstone became ill.  On the 25th the symptoms were alarming—­vomitings every quarter of an hour, which prevented any medicine from remaining on her stomach.  On the 26th she was worse and delirious.  On the evening of Sunday the 27th Dr. Stewart got a message from her husband that the end was drawing near.  “He was sitting by the side of a rude bed formed of boxes, but covered with a soft mattress, on which lay his dying wife.  All consciousness had now departed, as she was in a state of deep coma, from which all efforts to rouse her had been unavailing.  The strongest medical remedies and her husband’s voice were both alike powerless to reach the spirit which was still there, but was now so rapidly sinking into the depths of slumber, and darkness and death.  The fixedness of feature and the oppressed and heavy breathing only made it too plain that the end was near.  And the man who had faced so many deaths, and braved so many dangers, was now utterly broken down and weeping like a child.”