It is difficult to summarise Livingstone’s achievements during the eleven years he had spent in Africa. He had penetrated furthest north from the Cape of any white man. He had discovered Lake Ngami, and the upper reaches of the Zambesi. He had given Christianity a foothold among the Bakwains and the Makololo. He had converted one of the most remarkable chiefs in Central Africa. He had built three houses with his own hands, and had taught many hundreds to read. He had exercised the healing art to the relief and benefit of thousands. He had made some progress in reducing Sechuana to a grammatical language; and had even composed hymns in it. He had made invaluable scientific researches, and had enriched our knowledge of the animalia, flora, and fauna of Central Africa. Above all, he had seen at first hand the horrors of the slave traffic, and had vowed himself to the ultimate prevention of this form of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Eleven busy, arduous, and perilous years had brought him to midlife. He was now about to dedicate all his ripe experience and unique powers of head and heart to the religious and social redemption of the dark interior of the continent to which he had consecrated his life. Even during his brief sojourn at the Cape he had been perfecting himself for the work that lay before him. He had studied astronomy, and had learned to take observations under Sir T. Maclear, the Astronomer Royal, who wrote of him afterwards: “What that man has done is unprecedented. You could go to any point across the entire continent along Livingstone’s track, and feel certain of your position.” In David Livingstone’s judgment it was impossible for a man to be too thoroughly equipped for the great business of a missionary. In one respect his equipment was necessarily poor. His financial resources were so meagre that he had to fall back on very lean kine to draw his waggon, which is why the journey to Kuruman took a full three months. There a broken wheel detained him, and possibly saved his life; for this was the time selected by the band of Dutch marauders to wreak their vengeance on him, and on the hapless tribe of Sechele. It is a shocking story, and in his sympathy with Sechele, sixty of whose people had been massacred, Livingstone could almost forget his own personal loss, though he grieved sorely over the wanton destruction of his books. Amid all his sorrow and heartbreak, he can yet smile at the humorous side. “We shall move more easily now that we are lightened of our furniture. They have taken away our sofa. I never had a good rest on it. We had only got it ready when we left. Well, they can’t have taken away all the stones. We shall have a seat in spite of them, and that, too, with a merry heart which doeth good like a medicine.” Never in this world was anyone who had so stout a philosophy for times of misfortune. He could jest that “the Boers had saved him the trouble of making a will.”