It is stated on September 12th that "the submarine cable between Europe and Africa has been successfully laid down; and the fact will be encouraging to all those croakers who see in the momentary failure of the Atlantic line a cause of despondency. The Mediterranean cable failed at the first trial, and has succeeded at the second. Messrs. R. S. Newall & Co. have published the following note:-'We have the pleasure to inform you that a telegraph despatch from Cagliari, dated September 9, announces to us that the submarine cable connecting Europe and Africa has been successfully laid between Bona and Cape Teulada. The communication between Teulada and Spartivento, a distance of 17 miles, has to be made before regular telegraphic communication can be opened with Algeria. The cable is a heavy one, with four conducting wires, and has been laid successfully in above 100 nauts of 1,600 to 1,700 fathoms water. The total distance covered is 124 nauts, or 145 miles.'' The submarine cable Europe and between Africa. David Long articles, are devoted on November 7th and 14th to Dr. Livingstone's 'Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; in- Livingstone. cluding a Sketch of Sixteen Years' Residence in the Interior.' "David Livingstone came of a Highland stock, nurtured in mythic Ulva, one of the Hebrides, among wild, windy sea-music, His parentage. the old Stuart faith and Culloden traditions. His grandfather, a little farmer, was a man after Scott's heart, primed with pedigree and legend; -the gude wife given to crooning Gaelic ditties in supposed lugubrious lament of a certain anachronistic captivity endured by Highlanders somewhere among the Turks. The supply of the farm became too scanty for the household, and the family made a flitting up the Clyde, beyond Glasgow, where there was a cotton-mill, and the sons were received as clerks. Here our traveller appears to have been born and bred among ancestral precepts and ethics, which always ended in an oft-reiterated, though sometimes pretermitted, Highland refrain, 'Be honest.' The father was a little tea-dealer,—a calling which, as he practised it, brought him in no worldly wealth, though it advanced him high in the rank of old-fashioned Presbyterian virtue; -the mother, a thrifty housewife, patterned after Burns's type, that 'gars auld clothes look Boyhood. amaist as weel as new.' At ten years old, David went into the factory to earn his bread. Out of his first week's wages he saved enough to buy 'The Rudiments of Latin,' which he conned at a night-school from eight to ten. Dictionary researches occupied the time often till midnight, or later, if the mother did not snatch the books out of her boy's hands. The factory bell rang Reading under at six in the morning, and the whirr of the loom went on, with a brief quietude for breakfast and dinner, till eight at night. By setting his book on a portion of the spinning-jenny, the boy difficulties. glanced off sentence after sentence as he passed to and fro to unloop or break the spinning threads. So he read Horace and Virgil, books of travel and science, and acquired the art of abstracting his mind so as, in later days, to write readily amid the play of children, and uninterrupted by the songs and dances of negroes. He ranged freely over all literary pabulum, except novels; though his father-a precisian in his taste as well as his creedlooked somewhat sourly on his son's fondness for tales of travel or shipwreck, for records of science or discovery, in preference to the glories of the 'Cloud of Witnesses,' or the amenities of the 'Fourfold State.' A smart, paternal argument, d posteriori, made David grieve, but not repent, for the objections he had to forming an acquaintance with 'Practical Christianity.' He found better sermons in stones, and a more healing theology in plants. He scoured Lanarkshire with his brothers, far and wide, collecting simples. They dabbled in occult science, and had stolen interviews with demonology. His first rebuff in geology was among the shells of a limestone quarry. The quarryman looked on VOL. II. D at Glasgow. in compassionating ignorance. 'How ever did these shells come into these rocks?' asked the young savant.-'When God made the rocks he made the shells in them!' was the stout reply. "A few years and David was almost out of his teens; he had good wages, and he laid by enough through manual labour in summer to Attends enable him to attend the winter Greek classes Greek classes at Glasgow, as well as Dr. Wardlaw's Divinity lectures, without a farthing of aid. Among honest God-fearing compatriots he struggled on till he obtained his medical diploma, intent upon wending his way as a missionary in the practice of medicine to China. The war broke out, and Dr. Moffat. through the agency of Mr. Moffat his fatherin-law and the London Missionary Society he turned his thoughts and aspirations Africawards. For that country he embarked in 1840." He returned to England in 1856, after an absence of sixteen years, during which he discovered Lake Ngami and the river Zambesi. CHAPTER II. THE ATHENAEUM, 1858. ON the seventh day of the new year a brief telegram was received from India announcing that "General Havelock died on the 24th of November from dysentery, brought on by exposure and anxiety." On the 16th of January the following tribute appears in the Athenæum:— HAVELOCK. Wherever banner quivered on the wall, While Christmas beaker steamed with jovial foam, After the fond, familiar name of home, Thy name came next-as though a nation's call Of "Welcome back from Victory!" shook the hall, Hailing a weary chief, in glory come To grace with pride old England's festival. -Who dreamed the task was done?-that Silence strange Had stilled the sharp pursuing trumpet's breath? -That arm so prompt to rescue and avenge Could lie so cold, re-conquered sands beneath ?— O my true country! shall not such a death Speak to thy myriad hearts with tongue no time can change? H. F. C Death of Havelock. General |