He was planning his campaign during the years when he passed with his wife and children from one settlement to another. Three houses he built with his own hands, and made some progress in the cultivation of gardens round them. The first was at Mabotsa. It was the home to which he brought his young bride and to leave it went to his heart. His going was the result of the attitude adopted towards him by a brother missionary. Sooner than cause scandal among the tribe he resolved to give everything up and go elsewhere. “Paradise will make amends for all our privations and sorrows here,” he says simply. It is something to know that the missionary who did him this injustice lived “to manifest a very different spirit.” Livingstone next cast in his lot with Sechele and his people, and built his second house at Chonuane, some forty miles from Mabotsa. It was hard work, and it made a big drain on his very small income, but it was not his way to complain. The hardship fell more severely on his wife and infant children, and he felt the deprivations and inconveniences most for them. The house was finished in course of time, and a school was erected too, where the children were instructed, and services held. But nature was against a long settlement at Chonuane. A period of prolonged drought set in. Supplies were exhausted. The people had to go further afield, and the position became untenable. There was nothing for it but for the Livingstones to go too. All the labour of rebuilding had to be undertaken again, this time at Kolobeng, another forty miles on. Providence was indeed to Livingstone “like as an eagle stirring up the nest.” Such of the tribe as were left went with him and a new village was constructed. Livingstone and his family lived for a year in “a mere hut.” In 1848 the new house was actually built, despite some serious personal accidents of which he made light in his usual way. “What a mercy to be in a house again!” he writes home; “a year in a little hut through which the wind blew our candles into glorious icicles (as a poet would say) by night, and in which crowds of flies continually settled on the eyes of our poor little brats by day, makes us value our present castle. Oh Janet, know thou, if thou art given to building castles in the air, that that is easy work compared to erecting cottages on the ground!” Such was the building of his third house, the one that was afterwards sacked by the Boers. Then he built no more houses. Indeed, he never had a home of his own in Africa afterwards. The dark problem of Central Africa had him in its grip. He sent his wife and children home to England; and he himself became like that Son of Man whose example he followed so nearly, one “who had not where to lay his head.”