Neil Livingstone and Agnes Hunter were married in 1810, and took up house at first in Glasgow. The furnishing of their house indicated the frugal character and self-respect of the occupants; it included a handsome chest of drawers, and other traditional marks of respectability. Not liking Glasgow, they returned to Blantyre. In a humble home there, five sons and two daughters were born. Two of the sons died in infancy, to the great sorrow of the parents. Mrs. Livingstone's family spoke and speak of her as a very loving mother, one who contributed to their home a remarkable element of brightness and serenity. Active, orderly, and of thorough cleanliness, she trained her family in the same virtues, exemplifying their value in their own home. She was a delicate little woman, with a wonderful flow of good spirits, and remarkable for the beauty of her eyes, to which those of her son David bore a strong resemblance. She was most careful of household duties, and attentive to her children. Her love had no crust to penetrate, but came beaming out freely like the light of the sun. Her son loved her, and in many ways followed her. It was the genial, gentle influences that had moved him under his mother's training that enabled him to move the savages of Africa. She, too, had a great store of family traditions, and, like the mother of Sir Walter Scott, she retained the power of telling them with the utmost accuracy to a very old age. In one of Livingstone's private journals, written in 1864, during his second visit home, he gives at full length one of his mother's stories, which some future Macaulay may find useful as an illustration of the social condition of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century: