l overboard and was drowned. When they did at last land
they had to face, not only the terrors of a North American winter, but
sickness brought on by the hard work and poor food following the effects
of overcrowding on the voyage.

Soon the death-rate in this small village amounted to as much as two to
three persons a day. Wolves howled at night, Indians crept out to spy
from behind trees, cruel winds shook their frail wooden houses and froze
the dwellers in them, but the courage of the women pioneers of New
England never faltered, and when, one by one, they died, worn out by
hardship, they had done their noble part in building an altar to Him
whom, in their own land, they had not been permitted to serve as they
would.

For many years the task of helping to found settlements was the only
work done by women in the way of opening up new territory. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most of our discoveries were still
those of the mariner, who could scarcely take his wife to sea. But in
the nineteenth came the rise of foreign missions, as well as the
acknowledgment of the need of inland exploration, and in this work the
explorer's wife often shared in the risks and adventures of her husband.

When Robert Moffat began his missionary labours in South Africa in 1816,
he had not only to preach the gospel to what were often bloodthirsty
savages, but he had to plunge into the unknown. Three years later he
married Mary Smith, who was henceforth to be his companion in all his
journeys, and to face, with a courage not less than his own, the
tropical heat, the poisonous insects, the savage beasts, the fierce
natives of a territory untrod by the white man, and who had to do all
this in a day before medicine had discovered cures for jungle-sickness
and poisons, before invention had improved methods of travel, and before
knowledge had been able to prepare maps or to write guides.

It was the daughter of Mary Moffat who became the wife of the greatest
of all explorers, David Livingstone, and who like her mother, was to set
her foot where no white men or women had stood before.

Their first home was at Mabotsa, about two hundred miles from what is
now the city of Pretoria. But soon Livingstone began the series of
journeys which was to make his name famous. With his wife he travelled
in a roomy wagon, drawn by bullocks at a rate of about two miles an
hour. But they often suffered intensely from the heat and the scarcity
of wa