Early in May telegrams were received in London announcing that Dr. Livingstone, the African explorer, as to whose safety much anxiety had been felt, had been discovered by Mr. Stanley, a special correspondent on the staff of the _New York Herald_, who had been despatched by Mr. J. Gordon Bennett, the proprietor of that journal, to look for the missing traveller. The Queen received these tidings with the deepest gratification, not unmingled with regret that the honour of the discovery should pass to an American expedition. Her interest in Livingstone, and in his last efforts to discover the sources of the Nile, was well known--indeed, when in England the explorer had a private interview with her Majesty, of which an account is given in Mr. Blaikie’s “Personal Life of Dr. Livingstone.” “She [the Queen] sent for Livingstone,” writes Mr. Blaikie, “who attended her Majesty at the Palace without ceremony, in his black coat and blue trousers and his cap surrounded with a stripe of gold lace. This was his usual attire, and the cap had now become the appropriate distinction of one of her Majesty’s Consuls--an official position to which the traveller attaches great importance as giving him consequence in the eyes of natives and authority over the members of the expedition. The Queen conversed with him affably for half-an-hour on the subject of his travels. Dr. Livingstone told her Majesty that he would now be able to say to the natives that he had seen his chief, his not having done so before having been a constant subject of surprise to the children of the African wilderness. He mentioned to her Majesty also that the people were in the habit of inquiring whether his chief were wealthy, and when he answered them that she was very wealthy they would ask how many cows she had got, a question at which the Queen laughed very heartily.” Mr. Stanley had found Livingstone at Ujiji near Lake Tanganyika, and on his way back to Zanzibar he met the English Expedition, which had been despatched by the Royal Geographical Society, carrying succour to the explorer. As Livingstone’s orders were to refuse this tardy aid, the chiefs of the British Expedition had to return. Some people were at first sceptical as to the story told by Mr. Stanley, but doubts were set at rest on the 27th of August, when Lord Granville sent to Mr. Stanley a gold snuff-box set with diamonds as a gift from the Queen. Accompanying the present was the following letter:--