been gutted by the Custom-House thieves, and only a very few plain karosses left in it.  When we see a box which has been opened we have not half the pleasure which we otherwise should in unpacking it....  Can you give me any information how these annoyances may be prevented?  Or must we submit to it as one of the crooked things of this life, which Solomon says cannot be made straight?”

Not only in these scenes of active missionary labor, but everywhere else, Livingstone was in the habit of preaching to the natives, and conversing seriously with them on religion, his favorite topics being the love of Christ, the Fatherhood of God, the resurrection, and the last judgment.  His preaching to them, in Dr. Moffat’s judgment, was highly effective.  It was simple, scriptural, conversational, went straight to the point, was well fitted to arrest the attention, and remarkably adapted to the capacity of the people.  To his father he writes (5th July, 1848):  “For a long time I felt much depressed after preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ to apparently insensible hearts; but now I like to dwell on the love of the great Mediator, for it always warms my own heart, and I know that the gospel is the power of God—­the great means which He employs for the regeneration of our ruined world.”

In the beginning of 1849 Livingstone made the first of a series of journeys to the north, in the hope of planting native missionaries among the people.  Not to interrupt the continuous account of these journeys, we may advert here to a visit paid to him at Kolobeng, on his return from the first of them, in the end of the year, by Mr. Freeman of the London Missionary Society, who was at that time visiting the African stations.  Mr. Freeman, to Livingstone’s regret, was in favor of keeping up all Colonial stations, because the London Society alone paid attention to the black population.  He was not much in sympathy with Livingstone.

“Mr. Freeman,” he writes confidentially to Mr. Watt, “gave us no hope to expect any new field to be taken up.  ’Expenditure to be reduced in Africa’ was the word, when I proposed the new region beyond us, and there is nobody willing to go except Mr. Moffat and myself.  Six hundred miles additional land-carriage, mosquitoes in myriads, sparrows by the million, an epidemic frequently fatal, don’t look well in a picture.  I am 270 miles from Kuruman; land-carriage for all that we use makes a fearful inroad into the L100 of salary, and then 600 miles beyond this makes one think unutterable things, for nobody likes to call for more salary.  I think the Indian salary ought to be given to those who go into the tropics.  I have a very strong desire to go and reduce the new language to writing, but I cannot perform impossibilities.  I don’t think it quite fair for the Churches to expect their messenger to live, as if he were the Prodigal Son, on the husks that the swine do eat, but I should be ashamed to say so to any one but