the beating heart with which she tried to get the essence of his letter before she read the lines—­of the overwhelming joy and gratitude with which she learned that they had met—­and then the horror of great darkness that came over her when she read of the tragic death of the Bishop, to whom she had learned to feel as to a friend and brother.  Then she pours out her tears over the “poor dear ladies, Miss Mackenzie and Mrs. Burrup,” and remembers the similar fate of the Helmores, who, like the Bishop and his friends, had had it in their hearts to build a temple to the Lord in Africa, but had not been permitted.  Then comes some family news, especially about her son Robert, whose sudden death occurred a few days after, and was another bitter drop in the family cup.  And then some motherly forecastings of her daughter’s future, kindly counsel where she could offer any, and affectionate prayers for the guidance of God where the future was too dark for her to penetrate.

For a whole month before this letter was written, poor Mary had been sleeping under the baobab-tree at Shupanga!

In Livingstone’s letter to Mrs. Moffat he gives the details of her illness, and pours his heart out in the same affectionate terms as in his Journal.  He dwells on the many unhappy causes of delay which had detained them near the mouth of the river, contrary to all his wishes and arrangements.  He is concerned that her deafness (through quinine) and comatose condition before her death prevented her from giving him the indications he would have desired respecting her state of mind in the view of eternity.

“I look,” he says, “to her previous experience and life for comfort, and thank God for his mercy that we have it....  A good wife and mother was she.  God have pity on the children—­she was so much beloved by them....  She was much respected by all the officers of the ’Gorgon,’—­they would do anything for her.  When they met this vessel at Mozambique, Captain Wilson offered his cabin in that fine large vessel, but she insisted rather that Miss Mackenzie and Mrs. Burrup should go....  I enjoyed her society during the three months we were together.  It was the Lord who gave and He has taken away.  I wish to say—­Blessed be his name.  I regret, as there always are regrets after our loved ones are gone, that the slander which, unfortunately, reached her ears from missionary gossips and others had an influence on me in allowing her to come, before we were fairly on Lake Nyassa.  A doctor of divinity said, when her devotion to her family was praised:  ’Oh, she is no good, she is here because her husband cannot live with her,’ The last day will tell another tale.”