One day Asmani, who was now chief of Livingstone’s caravan, the other having died of small-pox, two or three days before, brought out a tent to the veranda where, I was sitting writing, and shewed me a packet of letters, which to my surprise was marked: 

“To Dr. Livingstone, " Ujiji, “November 1st, 1870.

" Registered letters.”

From November 1st, 1870, to February 10, 1871, just one hundred days, at Bagamoyo!  A miserable small caravan of thirty-three men halting one hundred days at Bagamoyo, only twenty-five miles by water from Zanzibar!  Poor Livingstone!  Who knows but he maybe suffering for want of these very supplies that were detained so long near the sea.  The caravan arrived in Unyanyembe some time about the middle of May.  About the latter part of May the first disturbances took place.  Had this caravan arrived here in the middle of March, or even the middle of April, they might have travelled on to Ujiji without trouble.

On the 7th of July, about 2 P.M., I was sitting on the burzani as usual; I felt listless and languid, and a drowsiness came over me; I did not fall asleep, but the power of my limbs seemed to fail me.  Yet the brain was busy; all my life seemed passing in review before me; when these retrospective scenes became serious, I looked serious; when they were sorrowful, I wept hysterically; when they were joyous, I laughed loudly.  Reminiscences of yet a young life’s battles and hard struggles came surging into the mind in quick succession:  events of boyhood, of youth, and manhood; perils, travels, scenes, joys, and sorrows; loves and hates; friendships and indifferences.  My mind followed the various and rapid transition of my life’s passages; it drew the lengthy, erratic, sinuous lines of travel my footsteps had passed over.  If I had drawn them on the sandy floor, what enigmatical problems they had been to those around me, and what plain, readable, intelligent histories they had been to me!

The loveliest feature of all to me was the form of a noble, and true man, who called me son.  Of my life in the great pine forests of Arkansas, and in Missouri, I retained the most vivid impressions.  The dreaming days I passed under the sighing pines on the Ouachita’s shores; the new clearing, the block-house, our faithful black servant, the forest deer, and the exuberant life I led, were all well remembered.  And I remembered how one day, after we had come to live near the Mississipi, I floated down, down, hundreds of miles, with a wild fraternity of knurly giants, the boatmen of the Mississipi, and how a dear old man welcomed me back, as if from the grave.  I remembered also my travels on foot through sunny Spain, and France, with numberless adventures in Asia Minor, among Kurdish nomads.  I remembered the battle-fields of America and the stormy scenes of rampant war.  I remembered gold mines, and broad prairies, Indian councils, and much experience in the new western lands.  I remembered the shock it gave me to hear after my return from a barbarous country of the calamity that had overtaken the fond man whom I called father, and the hot fitful life that followed it.  Stop! ************