heart of the Dark
Continent. Quite as dramatic, perhaps, was the departure of Stanley
in pursuit of Livingstone. Stanley was not widely known previous to
his expedition to Africa in search of Livingstone. He had served as
a war correspondent of one of the great New York newspapers for
several years, and was known to his craft as a faithful, accurate,
and courageous newspaper correspondent. He had dared many dangers,
and had encountered and overcome obstacles that would have dismayed
a less intrepid soul. In 1868 he served the _New York Herald_ as
correspondent during the war in Abyssinia which raged between the
British and King Theodore. It was here he got his first taste of
African adventure. It was not a long war. The British shut up King
Theodore in the fortress of Magdala, where he perished miserably by
his own hand in the flames of his burning citadel. Thence Stanley
went to Spain, where a great civil war had broken out, and he
witnessed the sacking of cities, the prosecution of sieges, and
battles large and small innumerable.

This war over, in the autumn of 1869, the civilized world was
wondering whether Dr. Livingstone, the African missionary and
explorer, were dead or alive. Dr. Livingstone, who was of Scottish
birth and was in the service of the London Missionary Society, had
been long laboring in South Africa, a country of which the outer
world then knew but very little. Along the coast here and there were
points occupied temporarily by white traders and travellers, but the
interior of the Dark Continent was known only through the tales of
the slave-catchers, who brought to the coast the black people they
had gathered like so many cattle in the interior. Dr. Livingstone
was doing what he could to spread the light of the Christian
religion through those benighted regions. His first departure into
the interior of Africa was from Cape Town, in 1840, and for more
than thirty-three years he spent his life in the arduous work to
which he had consecrated himself. In 1858 he had returned to England
and published a book, giving an account of his missionary labors and
his discoveries, and, liberally provided with means, he returned to
Africa to carry on his work. He was accompanied by his wife, who
died in the interior of Africa in 1862. In 1863 he returned to
England and published a second book, giving some further account of
his explorations.

Again, in 1865, he returned to Africa, and for more than a year no
wor