imself into the manse and ran up to his work-room, where
he began to print off some pages that he had set up on his little
printing press.

At supper his mother looked sadly at her boy with his dancing eyes as
he told her about the wonders of the railway engine. In her heart she
wanted him to be a minister. And she did not see any sign that this
boy would ever become one: this lad of hers who was always running off
from his books to peer into the furnaces of the gas works, or to tease
the village carpenter into letting him plane a board, or to sit, with
chin in hands and elbows on knees, watching the saddler cutting
and padding and stitching his leather, or to creep into the
carding-mill--like the Budge and Toddy whose lives he had read--"to
see weels go wound."

It was a bitter cold night in the Christmas vacation fourteen years
later.[51] Alec Mackay, now a young engineering student, was lost to
all sense of time as he read of the hairbreadth escapes and adventures
told by the African explorer, Stanley, in his book, _How I found
Livingstone_.

He read these words of Stanley's:

"For four months and four days I lived with Livingstone in the
same house, or in the same boat, or in the same tent, and I never
found a fault in him.... Each day's life with him added to my
admiration for him. His gentleness never forsakes him: his
hopefulness never deserts him. His is the Spartan heroism, the
inflexibility of the Roman, the enduring resolution of the
Anglo-Saxon. The man has conquered me."

Alexander Mackay put down Stanley's book and gazed into the fire.
Since the days when he had trudged as a boy down to the station to see
the railway engine he had been a schoolboy in the Grammar School at
Aberdeen, and a student in Edinburgh, and while there had worked in
the great shipbuilding yards at Leith amid the clang and roar of the
rivetters and the engine shop. He was now studying in Berlin, drawing
the designs of great engines far more wonderful than the railway
engine he had almost worshipped as a boy.

On the desk at Mackay's side lay his diary in which he wrote his
thoughts. In that diary were the words that he himself had written:

"This day last year[52] Livingstone died--a Scotsman and a
Christian--loving God and his neighbour, in the heart of Africa.
'Go thou and do likewise.'"

Mackay wondered. Could it ever be that he would go into the heart of
Africa like Livingstone? i