fireside brighter. He contributed constantly to the happiness of the
family. Anything of interest that happened to him he was always ready to
tell them. The habit was kept up in after-years. When he went to study
in Glasgow, returning on the Saturday evenings, he would take his place
by the fireside and tell them all that had occurred during the week,
thus sharing his life with them. His sisters still remember how they
longed for these Saturday evenings. At the village school he received
his early education. He seems from his earliest childhood to have been
of a calm, self-reliant nature. It was his father's habit to lock the
door at dusk, by which time all the children were expected to be in the
house. One evening David had infringed this rule, and when he reached
the door it was barred. He made no cry nor disturbance, but having
procured a piece of bread, sat down contentedly to pass the night on the
doorstep. There, on looking out, his mother found him. It was an early
application of the rule which did him such service in later days, to
make the best of the least pleasant situations. But no one could yet
have thought how the rule was to be afterward applied. Looking back to
this period, Livingstone might have said, in the words of the old
Scotch ballad:

"O little knew my mother,
The day she cradled me,
The lands that I should wander o'er,
The death that I should dee."

At the age of nine he got a New Testament from his Sunday-school teacher
for repeating the 119th Psalm on two successive evenings with only five
errors, a proof that perseverance was bred in his very bone.

His parents were poor, and at the age of ten he was put to work in the