Sunday-school teacher, an ardent member of a missionary society, and a promoter of meetings for prayer and fellowship, before such things had ceased to be regarded as badges of fanaticism. While traveling through the neighboring parishes in his vocation of tea-merchant, he acted also as colporteur, distributing tracts and encouraging the reading of useful books. He took suitable opportunities when they came to him of speaking to young men and others on the most important of all subjects, and not without effect. He learned Gaelic that he might be able to read the Bible to his mother, who knew that language best. He had indeed the very soul of a missionary. Withal he was kindly and affable, though very particular in enforcing what he believed to be right. He was quick of temper, but of tender heart and gentle ways; anything that had the look of sternness was the result not of harshness but of high principle. By this means he commanded the affection as well as the respect of his family. It was a great blow to his distinguished son, to whom in his character and ways he bore a great resemblance, to get news of his death, on his way home after his great journey, dissipating the cherished pleasure of sitting at the fireside and telling him all his adventures in Africa.

The wife of Neil Livingstone was Agnes Hunter, a member of a family of the same humble rank and the same estimable character as his own. Her grandfather, Gavin Hunter, of the parish of Shotts, was a doughty Covenanter, who might have sat for the portrait of David Deans. His son David (after whom the traveler was named) was a man of the same type, who got his first religious impressions in his eighteenth year, at an open-air service conducted by one of the Secession Erskines. Snow was falling at the time, and before the end of the sermon the people were standing in snow up to the ankles; but David Hunter used to say he had no feeling of cold that day. He married Janet Moffat, and lived at first in comfortable circumstances at Airdrie, where he owned a cottage and a croft. Mrs. Hunter died, when her daughter Agnes, afterward Mrs. Neil Livingstone, was but fifteen. Agnes was her mother's only nurse during a long illness, and attended so carefully to her wants that the minister of the family laid his hand on her head, and said, "A blessing will follow you, my lassie, for your duty to your mother." Soon after Mrs. Hunter's death a reverse of fortune overtook her husband, who had been too good-natured in accommodating his neighbors. He removed to Blantyre, where he worked as a tailor. Neil Livingstone was apprenticed to him by his father, much against his will; but it was by this means that he became acquainted with Agnes Hunter, his future wife. David Hunter, whose devout and intelligent character procured for him great respect, died at Blantyre in 1834, at the age of eighty-seven. He was a great favorite with his grandchildren, to whom he was always kind, and whom he allowed to rummage freely among his books, of which he had a considerable collection, chiefly theological.

Neil Livingstone and Agnes Hunter were married in 1810, and took up house at first in Glasgow. The furnishing of their house indicated the frugal character and self-respect of the occupants; it included a handsome chest of drawers, and other traditional marks of respectability. Not liking Glasgow, they returned to Blantyre. In a humble home there, five sons and two daughters were born. Two of the sons died in infancy, to the great sorrow of the parents. Mrs. Livingstone's family spoke and speak of her as a very loving mother, one who contributed to their home a remarkable element of brightness and serenity. Active, orderly, and of thorough cleanliness, she trained her family in the same virtues, exemplifying their value in their own home. She was a delicate little woman, with a wonderful flow of good spirits, and remarkable for the beauty of her eyes, to which those of her son David bore a strong resemblance. She was most careful of household duties, and attentive to her children. Her love had no crust to penetrate, but came beaming out freely like the light of the sun. Her son loved her, and in many ways followed her. It was the genial, gentle influences that had moved him under his mother's training that enabled him to move the savages of Africa.

She, too, had a great store of family traditions, and, like the mother of Sir Walter Scott, she retained the power of telling them with the utmost accuracy to a very old age. In one of Livingstone's private journals, written in 1864, during his second visit home, he gives at full length one of his mother's stories, which some future Macaulay may find useful as an illustration of the social condition of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century:

"Mother told me stories of her youth: they seem to come back to her in her eighty-second year very vividly. Her grandfather, Gavin Hunter, could write, while most common people were ignorant of the art. A poor woman got him to write a petition to the minister of Shotts parish to augment her monthly allowance of sixpence, as she could not live on it. He was taken to Hamilton jail for this, and having a wife and three children at home, who without him would certainly starve, he thought of David's feigning madness before the Philistines, and beslabbered his beard with saliva. All who were found guilty were sent to the army in America, or the plantations. A sergeant had compassion on him, and said, 'Tell me, gudeman, if you are really out of your mind. I'll befriend you.' He confessed that he only feigned insanity, because he had a wife and three bairns at home who would starve if he were sent to the army. 'Dinna say onything mair to ony body,' said the kind-hearted sergeant. He then said to the commanding officer, 'They have given us a man clean out of his mind: I can do nothing with the like o' him,' The officer went to him and gave him three shillings, saying, 'Tak' that, gudeman, and gang awa' hame to your wife and weans, 'Ay,' said mother, 'mony a prayer went up for that sergeant, for my grandfather was an unco godly man. He had never had so much money in his life before, for his wages were only threepence a day."

Mrs. Livingstone, to whom David had always been a most dutiful son, died on the 18th June, 1865, after a lingering illness which had confined her to bed for several years. A telegram received by him at Oxford announced her death; that telegram had been stowed away in one of his traveling cases, for a year after (19th June, 1866), in his Last Journals, he wrote this entry: "I lighted on a telegram to-day:

'Your mother died at noon on the 18th June.

This was in 1865; it affected me not a little [3]."

[3] Last Journals vol. i. p. 55

The home in which David Livingstone grew up was bright and happy, and presented a remarkable example of all the domestic virtues. It was ruled by an industry that never lost an hour of the six days, and that welcomed and honored the day of rest; a thrift that made the most of everything, though it never got far beyond the bare necessaries of life; a self-restraint that admitted no stimulant within the door, and that faced bravely and steadily all the burdens of life; a love of books that showed the presence of a cultivated taste, with a fear of God that dignified the life which it moulded and controlled. To the last David Livingstone was proud of the class from which he sprang. When the highest in the land were showering compliments on him, he was writing to his old friends of "my own order, the honest poor," and trying, by schemes of colonization and otherwise, to promote their benefit. He never had the least