good-natured in accommodating his neighbors. He removed to Blantyre,
where he worked as a tailor. Neil Livingstone was apprenticed to him by
his father, much against his will; but it was by this means that he
became acquainted with Agnes Hunter, his future wife. David Hunter,
whose devout and intelligent character procured for him great respect,
died at Blantyre in 1834, at the age of eighty-seven. He was a great
favorite with his grandchildren, to whom he was always kind, and whom he
allowed to rummage freely among his books, of which he had a
considerable collection, chiefly theological.

Neil Livingstone and Agnes Hunter were married in 1810, and took up
house at first in Glasgow. The furnishing of their house indicated the
frugal character and self-respect of the occupants; it included a
handsome chest of drawers, and other traditional marks of
respectability. Not liking Glasgow, they returned to Blantyre. In a
humble home there, five sons and two daughters were born. Two of the
sons died in infancy, to the great sorrow of the parents. Mrs.
Livingstone's family spoke and speak of her as a very loving mother, one
who contributed to their home a remarkable element of brightness and
serenity. Active, orderly, and of thorough cleanliness, she trained her
family in the same virtues, exemplifying their value in their own home.
She was a delicate little woman, with a wonderful flow of good spirits,
and remarkable for the beauty of her eyes, to which those of her son
David bore a strong resemblance. She was most careful of household
duties, and attentive to her children. Her love had no crust to
penetrate, but came beaming out freely like the light of the sun. Her
son loved her, and in many ways followed her. It was the genial, gentle
influences that had moved him under his mother's training that enabled
him to move the savages of Africa.

She, too, had a great store of family traditions, and, like the mother
of Sir Walter Scott, she retained the power of telling them with the
utmost accuracy to a very old age. In one of Livingstone's private
journals, written in 1864, during his second visit home, he gives at
full length one of his mother's stories, which some future Macaulay may
find useful as an illustration of the social condition of Scotland in
the early part of the eighteenth century:

"Mother told me stories of her youth: they seem to come back to her in
her eighty-second year very vividly. Her grandfather, Gavin