At the Monteith & Co. cotton mill, where he and his brother John worked fourteen hours a day six days a week...
Chapter 2
David Livingstone, who had been taught to read by his father when he was only six, was more determined than the average student.
Chapter 2
Their father had a strict rule on Sunday that anyone who came home after sundown had to spend the night sleeping outside on the doorstep.
Chapter 2
Although this did not produce much money for his growing family, it did allow him to do the one thing he loved most of all. Wherever he went, Mr. Livingstone talked about God, prayed for people, and gave away hundreds of Christian tracts. When he got home each night, he would tell the children all about the adventures of his day.
Chapter 2
The following morning, David rose with the rest of the family at five o'clock. (The single room they all shared made it impossible for anyone to sleep late.)
Chapter 2
Three years. If he saved every extra penny he could, in three years he would have enough money saved to attend medical school for one term. By then he would be twenty-three years old.
Chapter 3
For the first time in his life, twenty-three-year-old David Livingstone felt completely alone. He had never spent a single night away from home before, and he had always had his brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents around him.
Chapter 3
Westminster Abbey...Little did David know that one day he too would be one of the famous people buried there.
Chapter 4
Thankfully, he already had a sermon written and memorized. Learning to write good sermons was one of the requirements for missionaries in training.
Chapter 4
The church was silent as everyone waited for David to begin. But the man who had been able to recite Psalm 119 since he was nine years old could suddenly not remember a single word of his sermon.
Chapter 4
David opened his mouth. "Friends," he began calmly, and then, unable to come up with anything else intelligent to say, he blurted, "I have forgotten all I had to say." With that he slammed his Bible shut, tucked it under his arm, and raced down the aisle and out the front door of the church.
Chapter 4
...although he would be the first to admit he was not a gripping speaker, he had assumed he would be able to preach an adequate sermon. How wrong he had been!
Chapter 4
Before David had finished his mutton stew, he had made up his mind. He would not wait for the end of the Opium War in China. There was missionary work to be done in Africa. That's where he would go.
Chapter 5
...younger brother Charles had emigrated to the United States and was studying to become a pastor at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Chapter 5
...Psalm 121, his favorite psalm...
Chapter 5
He had high hopes for the service, but once again he was reminded that he was not a natural preacher. The few crew that attended the service were sullen and rude, and David's sermons didn't seem to grab their attention.
Chapter 5
The smoke of a thousand villages beckoned him to get moving inland.
Chapter 5
David realized that living at Kuruman and working with the Reverend Moffatt was not for him. The fires of a thousand unmapped and unreached villages were burning to the north of Kuruman, and David had to find some way to reach them.
Chapter 6
An hour later, the entire village was in an uproar. The people loved David's shaving mirror most of all. They passed it from one person to the next, each trying to make a funnier face in the mirror than the one before. They laughed until tears ran down their faces.
Chapter 7
Chief Sechele thought he had an answer to David's problem. "Do you really think my people will eventually believe what you say just by talking to them?" he asked David. "I can only make them do something by beating them. Let me summon my head man, and with our rhinoceros hide whips we'll make the whole village believe!"
Chapter 11
Through the efforts of William Wilberforce in England, slavery had been outlawed in all British territories by 1833. This meant that the Boers had to free their slaves and find some other way to work their land.
Chapter 12
From the time David arrived in Cape Town and then in Port Elizabeth, he had not wanted to live around large groups of white people. He hated the constant arguing and bickering, and he wanted to live and work with native people far away from the influence of traders and slave owners.
Chapter 12
David took readings with his sextant and carefully recorded the spot on his map. He felt exhilarated. No white man knew about this river, and here he was standing at the edge of it.
Chapter 12
After describing his adventure, he ended the letter by saying, "I hope to be permitted to work as long as I live beyond other men's line of things, and plant the seed of the gospel where others have not planted.
Chapter 12
On August 4 [1851], everything they had endured was made worthwhile in a single moment. David Livingstone and Cotton Oswell sat on their horses and looked down at the mighty Zambezi River, a huge expanse of water about 400 yards wide, and deep, though how deep they could not tell.
