Some profess to find it hard reading the character of John Charles Frémont, calling it enigmatical and baffling. Not so with those who knew him best. "His unwritten history," writes one of these, "gives the clew to his life." That he was a man of indomitable courage none can deny; a man of lofty principle and unblemished character. An atmosphere of romance makes him the American Chevalier. He did more than any other man to open the pathways to the Pacific coast. The bitter feeling engendered by the California conquest, and his policy in the Civil War, is not yet extinct. Partisanship has biassed the most of his biographers. The intense feeling underlying the presidential campaign of 1856 did not conduce to a fair estimate of the man, who has suffered hardly less from the intense admiration of his friends than from jealousies of rivals and foes. "I tried to do my duty," he would say in his old age, when asked to explain knotty points about the conquest. "All that he ever did for the Government," says one who knew him well, "was uniformly repaid with injury." That is the verdict of one side of the controversy. The sifting and weighing of a mass of conflicting evidence, preceding the final verdict of permanent history, is not yet ended in Frémont's case. That the outcome will be illumination of his fame rather than obscuration, his unswerving defenders do not doubt. "Though the Pathfinders die, the paths remain open." [Signature: Jane Marsh Parker.] DAVID LIVINGSTONE By Professor W. G. BLAIKIE, LL.D. (1813-1873) [Illustration: David Livingstone.] David Livingstone, missionary and traveller, was born at Blantyre, in Lanarkshire, March 19, 1813. His parents, who were in humble life, were of devout and exemplary character; his father in particular being a great reader, especially of travels and missionary intelligence, and much interested in the enterprise of the nineteenth century. At the age of ten David became a worker in a cotton-factory at Blantyre, and continued in that laborious occupation for fourteen years. His thirst for knowledge led him to read all that he could lay his hands on; he used also to attend a night-class, after the long hours of the factory, for the study of Latin. The reading of Dick's "Philosophy of a Future State" was not only the means of a profound impression on his mind, but kindled the desire to devote his life as a missionary to the service of Christ.