Dr. Livingstone, with whose travels we are at present specially concerned, is no ordinary man.  The son of a Presbyterian deacon and small trader in Glasgow; set to work in a cotton factory at ten years old; buying a Latin grammar with his first earnings; working from six in the morning till eight at night, then attending evening-school till ten, and pursuing his studies till midnight; at sixteen a fair classical scholar, with no inconsiderable reading in books of science and travels, gained, sentence by sentence, with the book open before him on his spinning-jenny; botanizing and geologizing on holidays and at spare hours; poring over books of astrology till he was startled by inward suggestions to sell his soul to the Evil One as the price of the mysterious knowledge of the stars; soundly flogged by the good deacon his father by way of imparting to him a liking for Boston’s “Fourfold State” and Wilberforce’s “Practical Christianity”; then convinced by the writings of the worthy Thomas Dick that there was no hostility between Science and Religion, embracing with heart and mind the doctrines of evangelical Christianity, and resolving to devote his life to their extension among the heathen—­such are the leading features of the early life of David Livingstone.

He would equip himself for the warfare and afterward fight with the powers of darkness at his own cost.  So at the age of nineteen—­a slim, loose-jointed lad—­he commenced the study of medicine and Greek, and afterward of theology, in the University of Glasgow, attending lectures in the winter, paying his expenses by working as a cotton-spinner during the summer, without receiving a farthing of aid from any one.

His purpose was to go to China as a medical missionary, and he would have accomplished his object solely by his own efforts had not some friends advised him to join the London Missionary Society.  He offered himself, with a half hope that his application would be rejected, for it was not quite agreeable to one accustomed to work his own way to become dependent in a measure upon others.

By the time when his medical and theological studies were completed, the Opium War had rendered it inexpedient to go to China, and his destination was fixed for Southern Africa.

He reached his field of labor in 1840.  Having tarried for three months at the head station at Kuruman, and taken to wife a daughter of the well-known missionary Mr. Moffat, he pushed still farther into the country, and attached himself to the band of Sechele, chief of the Bakwains, or “Alligators”, a Bechuana tribe.  Here, cutting himself for six months wholly off from all European society, he gained an insight into the language, laws, modes of life, and habits of the Bechuanas, which proved of incalculable advantage in all his subsequent intercourse with them.

Sechele gave a ready ear to the missionary’s instructions.

“Did your forefathers know of a future judgment?” he asked.