as
to the genuineness of his letters to the _New York Herald_, the
familiarity of the writer with the poems of Whittier was made an
argument against him. But Livingstone knew a great part of the poetry of
Longfellow, Whittier, and others by heart.

There was one drawback to the new locality: it was infested with lions.
All the world knows the story of the encounter at Mabotsa, which was so
near ending Livingstone's career, when the lion seized him by the
shoulder, tore his flesh, and crushed his bone. Nothing in all
Livingstone's history took more hold of the popular imagination, or was
more frequently inquired about when he came home[21]. By a kind of
miracle his life was saved, but the encounter left him lame for life of
the arm which the lion crunched[22]. But the world generally does not
know that Mebalwe, the native who was with him, and who saved his life
by diverting the lion when his paw was on his head, was the teacher whom
Mrs. M'Robert's twelve pounds had enabled him to employ. Little did the
good woman think that this offering would indirectly be the means of
preserving the life of Livingstone for the wonderful work of the next
thirty years! When, on being attacked by Mebalwe, the lion left
Livingstone, and sprang upon him, he bit his thigh, then dashed toward
another man, and caught him by the shoulder, when in a moment, the
previous shots taking effect, he fell down dead. Sir Bartle Frere, in
his obituary notice of Livingstone read to the Royal Geographical
Society, remarked: "For thirty years afterward all his labors and
adventures, entailing such exertion and fatigue, were undertaken with a
limb so maimed that it was painful for him to raise a fowling-piece, or
in fact to place the left arm in any position above the level of the
shoulder."

[Footnote 21: He did not speak of it spontaneously, and sometimes he
gave unexpected answers to questions put to him about it. To one person
who asked very earnestly what were his thoughts when the lion was above
him, he answered, "I was thinking what part of me he would eat first"--a
grotesque thought, which some persons considered strange in so good a
man, but which was quite in accordance with human experience in similar
circumstances.]

[Footnote 22: The false joint in the crushed arm was the mark by which
the body of Livingstone was identified when brought home by his
followers in 1873.]

In his _Missionary Travels_ Livingstone says that but for the
importu