Almost unconsciously the man had dropped the spear points and arrow heads as he was speaking.  The chief listened while Livingstone, who was now on the bank, told the savages how he had come across the great waters from a far-off land with a message of peace and goodwill.

Unarmed and with a dauntless heroism the “white man who would go on” had won a great victory over that tribe.  He now passed on in his boat up the river and over rapids toward the wonderful shining Highlands in the heart of Africa.

"Deliverance to the Captives"

Dr. Kirk was recalled to England by the British Government; but Livingstone trudged on in increasing loneliness over mountains and across rivers and lakes, plunging through marshes, racked a score of times with fever, robbed of his medicines, threatened again and again by the guns of the slave-raiding Arabs and the spears and clubs of savage head-hunters, bearing on his bent shoulders the Cross of the negroes’ agony—­slavery, till at last, alone and on his knees in the dead of night, our Greatheart crossed his last River, into the presence of his Father in heaven.

Yet still, though his body was dead, his spirit would go on.  For the life Livingstone lived, the death he died, and the record he wrote of the slave-raiders’ horrible cruelties thrilled all Britain to heal that “open sore of the world.”  Queen Victoria made Dr. Kirk her consul at Zanzibar, and told him to make the Sultan of Zanzibar order all slave-trading through that great market to cease.  And to-day, because of David Livingstone, through all the thousands of miles of Africa over which he trod, no man dare lay the shackles of slavery on another.  To-day, where Livingstone saw the slave-market in Zanzibar, a grand church stands, built by negro hands, and in that cathedral you may hear the negro clergy reading such words as—­

  “The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
  Prepare ye the way of the Lord,
  Make His paths straight,”

and African boys singing in their own tongue words that sum up the whole life of David Livingstone.

  “He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted,
  To preach deliverance to the captives.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 44:  Dr Kirk, now Sir John Kirk, G.C.M.G., who, leaning upon his African ebony stick and gazing with his now dimmed eyes into the glow of the fire, told me many stories of his adventures with Livingstone on his Zambesi journeyings, including this one.  See next chapter.]

[Footnote 45:  A friend of mine asked a very old African in Matabeleland whether—­as a boy—­he remembered Dr. Livingstone.  “Oh, yes,” replied the aged Matabele, “he came into our village out of the bush walking thus,” and the old man got up and stumped along, imitating the determined tread of Livingstone, which, after sixty years, was the one thing he remembered.]