This was the beginning of our life at Ujiji.  I knew him not as a friend before my arrival.  He was only an object to me—­a great item for a daily newspaper, as much as other subjects in which the voracious news-loving public delight in.  I had gone over battlefields, witnessed revolutions, civil wars, rebellions, emeutes and massacres; stood close to the condemned murderer to record his last struggles and last sighs; but never had I been called to record anything that moved me so much as this man’s woes and sufferings, his privations and disappointments, which now were poured into my ear.  Verily did I begin to perceive that “the Gods above do with just eyes survey the affairs of men.”  I began to recognize the hand of an overruling and kindly Providence.

The following are singular facts worthy for reflection.  I was, commissioned for the duty of discovering Livingstone sometime in October, 1869.  Mr. Bennett was ready with the money, and I was ready for the journey.  But, observe, reader, that I did not proceed directly upon the search mission.  I had many tasks to fulfil before proceeding with it, and many thousand miles to travel over.  Supposing that I had gone direct to Zanzibar from Paris, seven or eight months afterwards, perhaps, I should have found myself at Ujiji, but Livingstone would not have been found there then; he was on the Lualaba; and I should have had to follow him on his devious tracks through the primeval forests of Manyuema, and up along the crooked course of the Lualaba for hundreds of miles.  The time taken by me in travelling up the Nile, back to Jerusalem, then to Constantinople, Southern Russia, the Caucasus, and Persia, was employed by Livingstone in fruitful discoveries west of the Tanganika.  Again, consider that I arrived at Unyanyembe in the latter part of June, and that owing to a war I was delayed three months at Unyanyembe, leading a fretful, peevish and impatient life.  But while I was thus fretting myself, and being delayed by a series of accidents, Livingstone was being forced back to Ujiji in the same month.  It took him from June to October to march to Ujiji.  Now, in September, I broke loose from the thraldom which accident had imposed on me, and hurried southward to Ukonongo, then westward to Kawendi, then northward to Uvinza, then westward to Ujiji, only about three weeks after the Doctor’s arrival, to find him resting under the veranda of his house with his face turned eastward, the direction from which I was coming.  Had I gone direct from Paris on the search I might have lost him; had I been enabled to have gone direct to Ujiji from Unyanyembe I might have lost him.

The days came and went peacefully and happily, under the palms of Ujiji.  My companion was improving in health and spirits.  Life had been brought back to him; his fading vitality was restored, his enthusiasm for his work was growing up again into a height that was compelling him to desire to be up and doing.  But what could he do, with five men and fifteen or twenty cloths?