glory of Christ would make me orphanize my children.  Even now my bowels yearn over them.  They Will forget me; but I hope when the day of trial comes, I shall not be found a more sorry soldier than those who serve an earthly sovereign.  Should you not feel yourselves justified in incurring the expense of their support in England, I shall feel called upon to renounce the hope of carrying the gospel into that country, and labor among those who live in a more healthy country, viz., the Bakwains.  But, stay, I am not sure; so powerfully convinced am I that it is the will of the Lord I should, I will go, no matter who opposes; but from you I expect nothing but encouragement.  I know you wish as ardently as I can that all the world may be filled with the glory of the Lord.  I feel relieved when I lay the whole case before you.”

He proposed that a brother missionary, Mr. Ashton, should be placed among the Bamangwato, a people who were in the habit of spreading themselves through the Bakalahari, and should thus form a link between himself and the brethren in the south.

In a postscript, dated Bamangwato, 14th November, he gratefully acknowledges a letter from the Directors, in which his plans are approved of generally.  They had recommended him to complete a dictionary of the Sichuana language.  This he would have been delighted to do when his mind was full of the subject, but with the new projects now before him, and the probability of having to deal with a new language for the Zambesi district, he could not undertake such a work at present.

In a subsequent letter to the Directors (Cape Town, 17th March, 1852), Livingstone finds it necessary to go into full details with regard to his finances.  Though he writes with perfect calmness, it is evident that his exchequer was sadly embarrassed.  In fact, he had already not only spent all the salary (L100) of 1852, but fifty-seven pounds of 1853, and the balance would be absorbed by expenses in Cape Town.  He had been as economical as possible; in personal expenditure most careful—­he had been a teetotaler for twenty years.  He did not hesitate to express his conviction that the salary was inadequate, and to urge the Directors to defray the extra expenditure which was now inevitable; but with characteristic generosity he urged Mr. Moffat’s Claims much more warmly than his own.

From expressions in Livingstone’s letter to the Directors, it is evident that he was fully aware of the risk he ran, in his new line of work, of appearing to sink the missionary in the explorer.  There is no doubt that next to the charge of forgetting the claims of his family, to which we have already adverted, this was the most plausible of the objections taken to his subsequent career.  But any one who has candidly followed his course of thought and feeling from the moment when the sense of unseen realities burst on him at Blantyre, to the time at which we have now arrived, must see that this view is altogether