cause of the catastrophe, but not one syllable of upbraiding was uttered by their mother, though the tearful eye told the agony within.  In the afternoon of the fifth day, to our inexpressible relief, some of the men returned with a supply of that fluid of which we had never before felt the true value.”

“No one,” he remarks in his Journal, “knows the value of water till be is deprived of it.  We never need any spirits to qualify it, or prevent an immense draught of it from doing us harm.  I have drunk water swarming with insects, thick with mud, putrid from other mixtures, and no stinted draughts of it either, yet never felt any inconvenience from it.”

“My opinion is,” he said on another occasion, “that the most severe labors and privations may be undergone without alcoholic stimulus, because those who have endured the most had nothing else but water, and not always enough of that.”

One of the great charms of Livingstone’s character, and one of the secrets of his power—­his personal interest in each individual, however humble—­appeared in connection with Shobo, the Bushman guide, who misled them and took the blunder so coolly.  “What a wonderful people,” he says in his Journal, “the Bushmen are! always merry and laughing, and never telling lies wantonly like the Bechuana.  They have more of the appearance of worship than any of the Bechuana.  When will these dwellers in the wilderness bow down before their Lord?  No man seems to care for the Bushman’s soul.  I often wished I knew their language, but never more than when we traveled with our Bushman guide, Shobo.”

Livingstone had given a fair trial to the experiment of traveling along with his family.  In one of his letters at this time he speaks of the extraordinary pain caused by the mosquitoes of those parts, and of his children being so covered with their bites, that not a square inch of whole skin was to be found on their bodies.  It is no wonder that he gave up the idea of carrying them with him in the more extended journey he was now contemplating.  He could not leave them at Kolobeng, exposed to the raids of the Boers; to Kuruman there were also invincible objections; the only possible plan was to send them to England, though he hoped that when he got settled in some suitable part of Sebituane’s dominions, with a free road to the sea, they would return to him, and help him to bring the people to Christ.

In the Missionary Travels Livingstone has given a full account of Sebituane, chief of the Makololo, “unquestionably the greatest man in all that country”—­his remarkable career, his wonderful warlike exploits (for which he could always bring forward justifying reasons), his interesting and attractive character, and wide and powerful influence.  In one thing Sebituane was very like Livingstone himself; he had the art of gaining the affections both of his own people and of strangers.  When a party of