the youngsters.  She sometimes has eighty, but the average may be sixty.  My manual labors are continued till about five o’clock.  I then go into the town to give lessons and talk to any one who may be disposed for it.  As soon as the cows are milked we have a meeting, and this is followed by a prayer-meeting in Secheles house, which brings me home about half-past eight, and generally tired enough, too fatigued to think of any mental exertion.  I do not enumerate these duties by way of telling how much we do, but to let you know a cause of sorrow I have that so little of my time is devoted to real missionary work.”

First there was a temporary house to be built, then a permanent one, and Livingstone was not exempted from the casualties of mechanics.  Once he found himself dangling from a beam by his weak arm.  Another time he had a fall from the roof.  A third time he cut himself severely with an axe.  Working on the roof in the sun, his lips got all scabbed and broken.  If he mentions such things to Dr. Bennett or other friend, it is either in the way of illustrating some medical point or to explain how he had never found time to take the latitude of his station till he was stopped working by one of these accidents.  At best it was weary work.  “Two days ago,” he writes to his sister Janet (5th July, 1848), “we entered our new house.  What a mercy to be in a house again!  A year in a little hut through which the wind blew our candles into glorious icicles (as a poet would say) by night, and in which crowds of flies continually settled on the eyes of our poor little brats by day, makes us value our present castle.  Oh, Janet, know thou, if thou art given to building castles in the air, that that is easy work to erecting cottages on the ground.”  He could not quite forget that it was unfair treatment that had driven him from Mabotsa, and involved him in these labors.  “I often think,” he writes to Dr. Bennett, “I have forgiven, as I hope to be forgiven; but the remembrance of slander often comes boiling up, although I hate to think of it.  You must remember me in your prayers, that more of the spirit of Christ may be imparted to me.  All my plans of mental culture have been broken through by manual labor.  I shall soon, however, be obliged to give my son and daughter a jog along the path to learning....  Your family increases, very fast, and I fear we follow in your wake.  I cannot realize the idea of your sitting with four around you, and I can scarcely believe myself to be so far advanced as to be the father of two.”

Livingstone never expected the work of real Christianity to advance rapidly among the Bakwains.  They were a slow people and took long to move.  But it was not his desire to have a large church of nominal adherents.  “Nothing,” he writes, “will induce me to form an impure church.  Fifty added to the church sounds fine at home, but if only five of these are genuine, what will it profit in the Great Day?  I have felt more than ever lately that the great object