(2) The Equipment for the Task. Never was a journey of such heroic proportions undertaken with so simple an equipment. When one reads of the elaborate preparations for modern expeditions not half so formidable one is amazed at the contrast. Many of my readers have probably seen the four tin canisters, fifteen inches square, that held the valuables. One contained spare shirts, trousers, and shoes to be used when civilisation was reached. One was a medicine chest. One a library. One held the magic lantern by means of which the Gospel story was to be preached. For the rest, there were twenty pounds of beads, value forty shillings, a few biscuits, a few pounds of tea and sugar, and about twenty pounds of coffee. There were five guns in all: three muskets for the natives who could use them, and who only hit things by accident; a rifle and double-barrelled shot gun for Livingstone, whose injured arm always made shooting difficult, and whose fever-shaken frame sometimes made it impossible. A bag of clothes for the journey, a small tent, a sheepskin mantle, and a horse-rug to sleep on completed this equipment. The sextant and other instruments were carried separately; and the ammunition was “distributed through the luggage,” so that if any portion were lost some powder and shot would remain to them. Twenty-seven “boys” were chosen for the westward journey; and it is as well to set down the fact here that all the twenty-seven were brought back in safety to their homes. The expedition left Linyanti on the 11th of November, 1853. Away in Europe the English and French fleets had entered the Bosphorus, and a delirious public opinion was hurrying Great Britain into the blunders of the Crimean War. Far away from all the “fool-furies” of European politics, one single-minded Christian hero was setting his heart on the more renowned victories of peace and freedom, with nothing to sustain him but his own quenchless faith in God and the Right. Even at the start he had been severely shaken with fever, and much preaching had brought back an old troublesome complaint in the throat; but these were personal inconveniences which he never allowed to deter him from any line of duty. The farewells were said with Sekeletu at Seshéke on the Zambesi, and the expedition passed away to the north-west into the great unknown.