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,