would those Scottish boys at Waverley Station have
wondered, as they gazed on the little woman and her group of black
children, if they had known that the woman who had done these things,
Mary Slessor, had been a Scottish factory girl, who had toiled at her
weaving machine from six in the morning till six at night amid the
whirr of the belts, the flash of the shuttles, the rattle of the
looms, and the roar of the great machines.

Born in Aberdeen, December 2, 1848, Mary Slessor was the daughter of
a Scottish shoemaker. Her mother was a gentle and sweet-faced woman.
After her father's death Mary was the mainstay of the home. Working
in a weaving shed in Dundee (whither the family moved when Mary was
eleven) she educated herself while at her machine.

_The Call to Africa_

Like Livingstone, she taught herself with her book propped up on
the machine at which she worked. She read his travels and heard the
stories of his fight against slavery for Africa, till he became her
hero.

One day the news flashed round the world: "Livingstone is dead. His
heart is buried in Central Africa." Mary had thrilled as she read the
story of his heroic and lonely life. Now he had fallen. She heard in
her heart the words that he had spoken:

"I go to Africa to try to make an open door....; do you carry out the
work which I have begun. I LEAVE IT WITH YOU."

As Mary sat, tired with her week's work, in her pew in the church on
Sunday, and thought of Livingstone's call to Africa, she saw visions
of far-off places of which she heard from the pulpit and read in her
magazines--visions of a steaming river on the West Coast of Africa
where the alligators slid from the mud banks into the water; visions
of the barracoons on the shore in which the captured negroes were
penned as they waited for the slave-ships; pictures of villages where
trembling prisoners dipped their hands in boiling oil to test their
guilt, and wives were strangled to go with their dead chief into the
spirit-land; visions of the fierce chiefs who could order a score of
men to be beheaded for a cannibal feast and then sell a hundred more
to be hounded away into the outer darkness of slavery--the Calabar
where the missionaries of her church were fighting the black darkness
of the most savage people of the world.

Mary Slessor made up her mind to go out and give her whole life to
Africa. So she offered herself, a timorous girl who could not cross a
field with a cow in it, as a