[Footnote 11:  We learn from the family that the precise object of the visit was to transact some business for his eldest brother, who had begun to deal in lace.  In the darkness of the morning Livingstone fell into a ditch, smearing his clothes, and not improving his appearance for smart business purposes.  The day was spent in going about in London from shop to shop, greatly increasing Livingstone’s fatigue.]

“Total abstinence at that time began to be spoken of, and Livingstone and I, and a Mr. Taylor, who went to India, took a pledge together to abstain[12].  Of that trio, two, I am sorry to say (heu me miserum!), enfeebled health, after many years, compelled to take a little wine for our stomachs’ sake.  Livingstone was one of the two.

[Footnote 12:  Livingstone had always practiced total abstinence, according to the invariable custom of his father’s house.  The third of the trio was the Rev. Joseph V.S.  Taylor, now of the Irish Presbyterian Mission, Gujerat, Bombay.]

“One part of our duties was to prepare sermons, which were submitted to Mr. Cecil, and, when corrected, were committed to memory, and then repeated to our village congregations.  Livingstone prepared one, and one Sunday the minister of Stamford Rivers; where the celebrated Isaac Taylor resided, having fallen sick after the morning service, Livingstone was sent for to preach in the evening.  He took his text, read it out very deliberately, and then—­then—­his sermon had fled!  Midnight darkness came upon him, and he abruptly said:  ’Friends, I have forgotten all I had to say,’ and hurrying out of the pulpit, he left the chapel.

“He never became a preacher” [we shall see that this does not apply to his preaching in the Sichuana language], “and in the first letter I received from him from Elizabeth Town, in Africa, he says:  ’I am a very poor preacher, having a bad delivery, and some of them said if they knew I was to preach again they would not enter the chapel.  Whether this was all on account of my manner I don’t know; but the truth which I uttered seemed to plague very much the person who supplies the missionaries with wagons and oxen. (They were bad ones.) My subject was the necessity of adopting the benevolent spirit of the Son of God, and abandoning the selfishness of the world.’  Each student at Ongar had also to conduct family worship in rotation.  I was much impressed by the fact that Livingstone never prayed without the petition that we might imitate Christ in all his imitable perfections[13].”

[Footnote 13:  In connection with this prayer, it is interesting to note the impression made by Livingstone nearly twenty years afterward on one who saw him but twice—­once at a public breakfast in Edinburgh, and again at the British Association in Dublin in 1857.  We refer to Mrs. Sime, sister of Livingstone’s early friend, Professor George Wilson, of Edinburgh.  Mrs. Sime writes; “I never knew any one who gave me more the idea of power over other men, such power as our Saviour showed while on earth, the power of love and purity combined.”]