heological studies were completed,
the Opium War had rendered it inexpedient to go to China, and his
destination was fixed for Southern Africa.

He reached his field of labor in 1840. Having tarried for three months
at the head station at Kuruman, and taken to wife a daughter of the
well-known missionary Mr. Moffat, he pushed still farther into the
country, and attached himself to the band of Sechele, chief of the
Bakwains, or "Alligators", a Bechuana tribe. Here, cutting himself for
six months wholly off from all European society, he gained an insight
into the language, laws, modes of life, and habits of the Bechuanas,
which proved of incalculable advantage in all his subsequent intercourse
with them.

Sechele gave a ready ear to the missionary's instructions.

"Did your forefathers know of a future judgment?" he asked.

"They knew of it," replied the missionary, who proceeded to describe the
scenes of the last great day.

"You startle me: these words make all my bones to shake; I have no more
strength in me. But my forefathers were living at the same time yours
were; and how is it that they did not send them word about these
terrible things? They all passed away into darkness without knowing
whither they were going."

Mr. Moffat had translated the Bible into the Bechuana language, which he
had reduced to writing, and Sechele set himself to learn to read, with
so much assiduity that he began to grow corpulent from lack of his
accustomed exercise. His great favorite was Isaiah. "He was a fine man,
that Isaiah; he knew how to speak," he was wont to say, using the very
words applied by the Glasgow Professor to the Apostle Paul. Having
become convinced of the truth of Christianity, he wished his people also
to become Christians. "I will call them together," he said, "and with
our rhinoceros-skin whips we will soon make them all believe together."
Livingstone, mindful, perhaps, of the ill success of his worthy father
in the matter of Wilberforce on "Practical Christianity", did not favor
the proposed line of argument. He was, in fact, in no great haste
to urge Sechele to make a full profession of faith by receiving the
ordinance of baptism; for the chief had, in accordance with the customs
of his people, taken a number of wives, of whom he must, in this case,
put away all except one. The head-wife was a greasy old jade, who was
in the habit of attending church without her gown, and when her husband
sent her home to m