How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. LivingstoneStanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
History
How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone
Stanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
Africa, Central -- Description and travel; Livingstone, David, 1813-1873
I respectfully beg to differ with all and each of the above statements.
I grant he is not an angel, but he approaches to that being as near
as the nature of a living man will allow. I never saw any spleen or
misanthropy in him--as for being garrulous, Dr. Livingstone is quite
the reverse: he is reserved, if anything; and to the man who says Dr.
Livingstone is changed, all I can say is, that he never could have known
him, for it is notorious that the Doctor has a fund of quiet humour,
which he exhibits at all times whenever he is among friends. I must
also beg leave to correct the gentleman who informed me that Livingstone
takes no notes or observations. The huge Letts's Diary which I carried
home to his daughter is full of notes, and there are no less than a
score of sheets within it filled with observations which he took during
the last trip he made to Manyuema alone; and in the middle of the book
there is sheet after sheet, column after column, carefully written, of
figures alone. A large letter which I received from him has been sent to
Sir Thomas MacLear, and this contains nothing but observations. During
the four months I was with him, I noticed him every evening making most
careful notes; and a large tin box that he has with him contains numbers
of field note-books, the contents of which I dare say will see the
light some time. His maps also evince great care and industry. As to the
report of his African marriage, it is unnecessary to say more than that
it is untrue, and it is utterly beneath a gentleman to hint at such a
thing in connection with the name of David Livingstone.
There is a good-natured abandon about Livingstone which was not lost
on me. Whenever he began to laugh, there was a contagion about it,
that compelled me to imitate him. It was such a laugh as Herr
Teufelsdrockh's--a laugh of the whole man from head to heel. If he
told a story, he related it in such a way as to convince one of its
truthfulness; his face was so lit up by the sly fun it contained, that I
was sure the story was worth relating, and worth listening to.
The wan features which had shocked me at first meeting, the heavy step
which told of age and hard travel, the grey beard and bowed shoulders,
belied the man. Underneath that well-worn exterior lay an endless fund
of high spirits and inexhaustible humour; that rugged frame of his
enclosed a young and most exuberant soul. Every day I heard innumerable
jokes and pleasant anecdotes; interesting hunting stories, in which his
friends Oswell, Webb, Vardon, and Gorden Cumming were almost always the
chief actors. I was not sure, at first, but this joviality, humour, and
abundant animal spirits were the result of a joyous hysteria; but as I
found they continued while I was with him, I am obliged to think them
natural.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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