“Come, Sekwebu,” said Livingstone, “we are going to Ma Robert.”  This struck a chord in his bosom.

“Oh yes,” said he; “where is she?  Where is Robert?” And for the moment he seemed to recover.

But in the evening a fresh accession of insanity occurred.  He attempted to spear one of the crew, and then leaped overboard, and, though he could swim well, pulled himself down, hand over hand, by the cable.  His body was never recovered.

From Mauritius Livingstone sailed for England, which he reached on the 12th of December, 1856—­four and a half years after he had parted from his family at Cape Town.

He was received with unwonted honors.  The President of the Royal Geographical Society, at a special meeting held to welcome him, formally invited him to give to the world a narrative of his travels.  Some knavish booksellers paid him the less acceptable compliment of putting forth spurious accounts of his adventures, one at least of which has been republished in this country.  Livingstone, so long accustomed to a life of action, found the preparation of his book a harder task than he had imagined.  “I think,” he says, “that I would rather cross the African continent again than undertake to write another book.”  We trust that he will yet do both.  He would indeed have set out on another African journey nearly a year ago to conduct his faithful Makololo attendants back to their own country, had not the King of Portugal relieved him from all anxiety on their account, by sending out directions that they should be supported at Tete until his return.

Our abstract does, at best, but scanty justice to the most interesting, as well as most valuable, of modern works of travel.  It has revolutionized our ideas of African character as well as of African geography.  It shows that Central Africa is peopled by tribes barbarous, indeed, but far from manifesting those savage and degrading traits which we are wont to associate with the negro race.  In all his long pilgrimage Livingstone saw scarcely a trace of the brutal rites and bloody superstitions of Dahomey and Ashanti.  The natives every where long for intercourse with the whites, and eagerly seek the products of civilized labor.  In regions where no white men had ever been seen the cottons of Lowell and Manchester, passed from tribe to tribe, are even now the standard currency.  Civilized nations have an equal interest in opening intercourse with these countries, for they are capable of supplying those great tropical staples which the industrious temperate zones must have, but can not produce.  Livingstone found cotton growing wild all along his route from Loanda to Kilimane; the sugar-cane flourishes spontaneously in the valley of “The River”; coffee abounds on the west coast; and indigo is a weed in the delta of the Zambesi.  Barth also finds these products abundant on the banks of the Benuwe and Shari, and around Lake Tsad.  The prevalent idea of the inherent laziness of the Africans must be abandoned, for, scattered through the narratives of both these intrepid explorers are abundant testimonies of the industrious disposition of the natives.