oyfully.

'My brave, brave boy!' said Father, and his voice was not quite steady.
'My own son! To think how nearly I lost him!'

Then remembrance came to Billikins. 'The baby?' he managed to say.

'The baby is safe, darling,' said Mother, from her side of the bed.
'Thanks to my brave little Billikins, who risked his life to go and
fetch it.'

Billikins smiled feebly.

'I--was not--brave,' he said; 'I--only remembered--what you told me,
that--I was--a--soldier's son.'

And he was so tired that he only wondered faintly why Father made a
funny sound in his throat, as if he were choking, and why Nurse
Katherine wiped her eyes.

[Illustration: "He staggered forward and reached the landing."]

[Illustration: "Lieutenant Fogan led a gallant resistance."]

STORIES FROM AFRICA.

VIII.--SOME MEN WHO WON THE BLESSING.

[Illustration]

I leave the work with you,' said Livingstone in the Senate House at
Cambridge, after speaking in burning words of the needs of Africa. He
went back himself to the land from which he returned only to his grave
in Westminster Abbey, and around the slab in the nave which bears his
name, we read his words to those who should take up the work he left
them: 'May Heaven's rich blessing come down on every one, American,
English, Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world.'

The 'open sore' was the traffic carried on in those days, without let or
hindrance, in the great slave-market of Zanzibar. The crowds of men,
women, and children who were paraded up and down, examined, and
bargained for, and then taken across to the clove plantations in Pemba,
or kept as domestic slaves in Zanzibar, were brought from the interior
by the Arabs, the great slave-dealers of East Africa. Sometimes a native
village had been attacked and set on fire, some of the inhabitants shot
down among their blazing huts, and the rest carried off. Sometimes the
Arabs would settle for some time in a neighbourhood for
elephant-hunting, and, when they had secured as much ivory as they
required, would stir up a quarrel between two villages and offer their
powerful aid to one side or the other, on condition of receiving all the
prisoners in payment. Then came the horrible journey to the coast. The
luckless slaves were yoked in gangs, often with their necks fastened
into forked sticks. The sick or feeble, unable to keep up with the rest,
were either killed or left to the mercy of wild beasts. Babies, whose
mot