ude his kindness, so that, if spared to look
upon these, my private memoranda, in future years, proper emotions may
ascend to Him who inclined his heart to show so much friendship."

The party followed the old route, around the bed of the Zouga, then
crossed a piece of the driest desert they had ever seen, with not an
insect or a bird to break the stillness. On the third day a bird chirped
in a bush, when the dog began to bark! Shobo, their guide, a Bushman,
lost his way, and for four days they were absolutely without water. In
his _Missionary Travels_, Livingstone records quietly, as was his wont
his terrible anxiety about his children.

"The supply of water in the wagons had been wasted by one of
our servants, and by the afternoon only a small portion
remained for the children. This was a bitterly anxious night;
and next morning, the less there was of water, the more
thirsty the little rogues became. The idea of their perishing
before our eyes was terrible; it would almost have been a
relief to me to have been reproached with being the entire
cause of the catastrophe, but not one syllable of upbraiding
was uttered by their mother, though the tearful eye told the
agony within. In the afternoon of the fifth day, to our
inexpressible relief, some of the men returned with a supply
of that fluid of which we had never before felt the
true value."

"No one," he remarks in his Journal, "knows the value of
water till be is deprived of it. We never need any spirits to
qualify it, or prevent an immense draught of it from doing us
harm. I have drunk water swarming with insects, thick with
mud, putrid from other mixtures, and no stinted draughts of
it either, yet never felt any inconvenience from it."

"My opinion is," he said on another occasion, "that the most
severe labors and privations may be undergone without
alcoholic stimulus, because those who have endured the most
had nothing else but water, and not always enough of that."

One of the great charms of Livingstone's character, and one of the
secrets of his power--his personal interest in each individual, however
humble--appeared in connection with Shobo, the Bushman guide, who misled
them and took the blunder so coolly. "What a wonderful people," he says
in his Journal, "the Bushmen are! always merry and laughing, and never
telling lies wantonly like the