As David Livingstone is now starting on his last and greatest march, which was to be lengthened out year after year, and to be signalised by unparalleled sufferings and heroic endurance, it will be well to acquaint ourselves with such plans as he had somewhat vaguely laid down. He realised that there are three great main waterways into the African interior: the Congo, the Zambesi, and the Nile. He was satisfied that no future exploration could do other than confirm his conclusions as to the watershed which he had traversed, from which certain rivers flowed north to the Congo, and certain others south to the Zambesi. But from earliest times the scientific imagination had been captured by the problem of the sources of the Nile. This was the greatest of all unsolved geographical problems; and to it Livingstone was attracted irresistibly, not only by his own native curiosity, but by that interest in classical questions which was a very marked characteristic of his mind. To this problem he knew that the system of inland lakes was the clue, and that whoever could completely explore them would settle the question for all time and “make himself an everlasting name.” That he would have numberless opportunities of proclaiming Christ to the scattered peoples of the interior, and would cut across the slave routes and perhaps be able to scheme out how to defeat the devilish purposes of the slavers, were motives with him even more powerful. So he got his caravan under way, marched south to Rovuma, and then south-west across the four hundred miles of country that lay between the coast and Lake Nyassa. The first stages were made miserable to Livingstone by the brutality of the sepoys to the dumb beasts. They were overloaded and overstrained and cruelly maltreated. Some of them die of sores, which the sepoys insist are caused by tsetse or by accidents. Meanwhile progress is depressingly slow; the district through which the expedition passes is famine-stricken, and food is most difficult to obtain. The sepoys go from bad to worse, and in two months are openly mutinous. They kill one camel, beating it over the head; and set themselves to corrupt the Nassick boys so as to tire Livingstone out. For weeks together it is nothing but one endless struggle on the part of the leader against this conspiracy to defeat his plans. Sometimes he tries the offer of increased wages; sometimes the threat of corporal punishment, but the indolence, cruelty, and illwill of the sepoys threaten the success of the expedition, and the spirit of disaffection spreads to the Nassick boys.