The Personal Life of David Livingstone by William Garden Blaikie
page 27 of 618 (04%)
page 27 of 618 (04%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
those days, like the Cape Caffres, as he says; and the tradition of
Kirsty's Rock would seem to confirm it. But the stories of the "baughting-time" presented a fairer aspect of Ulva life, and no doubt left happier impressions on his mind. His grandfather, as he tells us, had an almost unlimited stock of such stories, which he was wont to rehearse to his grandchildren and other rapt listeners. [Footnote 2: Kilninian and Kilmore. See _New Statistical Account of Scotland_, Argyllshire, p. 345] When, for the first and last time in his life, David Livingstone visited Ulva, in 1864, in a friend's yacht, he could hear little or nothing of his relatives. In 1792, his grandfather, as he tells us, left it for Blantyre, in Lanarkshire, about seven miles from Glasgow, on the banks of the Clyde, where he found employment in a cotton factory. The dying charge of the unnamed ancestor must have sunk into the heart of his descendant, for, being a God-fearing man and of sterling honesty, he was employed in the conveyance of large sums of money from Glasgow to the works, and in his old age was pensioned off, so as to spend his declining years in ease and comfort. There is a tradition in the family, showing his sense of the value of education, that he was complimented by the Blantyre school-master for never grudging the price of a school-book for any of his children--a compliment, we fear, not often won at the present day. The other near relations of Livingstone seem to have left the island at the same time, and settled in Canada, Prince Edward's Isle, and the United States. The influence of his Highland blood was apparent in many ways in David Livingstone's character. It modified the democratic influences of his earlier years, when he lived among the cotton spinners of Lanarkshire. |
|