I Have Heard Of Them So Often, And At Great Distances Off, That I Cannot Doubt Their Existence, And In Spite Of The Sore Longing For Home That Seizes Me Every Time I Think Of My Family, I Wish To Finish Up By Their Rediscovery.

Five hundred pounds sterling worth of goods have again unaccountably been entrusted to slaves, and have been over a year on the way, instead of four months.

I must go where they lie at your expense, ere I can put the natural completion to my work.

And if my disclosures regarding the terrible Ujijian slavery should lead to the suppression of the East Coast slave trade, I shall regard that as a greater matter by far than the discovery of all the Nile sources together. Now that you have done with domestic slavery for ever, lend us your powerful aid toward this great object. This fine country is blighted, as with a curse from above, in order that the slavery privileges of the petty Sultan of Zanzibar may not be infringed, and the rights of the Crown of Portugal, which are mythical, should be kept in abeyance till some future time when Africa will become another India to Portuguese slave-traders.

I conclude by again thanking you most cordially for your great generosity, and am,

Gratefully yours,

David Livingstone.

To the above letter I have nothing to add - it speaks for itself; but I then thought it was the best evidence of my success. For my own part, I cared not one jot or tittle about his discoveries, except so far as it concerned the newspaper which commissioned me for the "search." It is true I felt curious as to the result of his travels; but, since he confessed that he had not completed what he had begun, I felt considerable delicacy to ask for more than he could afford to give. His discoveries were the fruits of of his own labours - to him they belonged - by their publication he hoped to obtain his reward, which he desired to settle on his children. Yet Livingstone had a higher and nobler ambition than the mere pecuniary sum he would receive: he followed the dictates of duty. Never was such a willing slave to that abstract virtue. His inclinations impelled him home, the fascinations of which it required the sternest resolves to resist. With every foot of new ground he travelled over he forged a chain of sympathy which should hereafter bind the Christian nations in bonds of love and charity to the Heathen of the African tropics. If he were able to complete this chain of love - by actual discovery and description of them to embody such peoples and nations as still live in darkness, so as to attract the good and charitable of his own land to bestir themselves for their redemption and salvation - this, Livingstone would consider an ample reward.

"A delirious and fatuous enterprise, a Quixotic scheme!" some will say. Not it, my friends; for as sure as the sun shines on both Christian and Infidel, civilised and Pagan, the day of enlightenment will come; and, though Livingstone, the Apostle of Africa, may not behold it himself, nor we younger men, not yet our children, the Hereafter will see it, and posterity will recognise the daring pioneer of its civilization.

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