with her. The meal over, she would console herself with a few
whiffs from her clay "cutty" pipe. ¹

Husband and wife had removed temporarily to Glasgow soon
after their marriage, and in that city their eldest son John was
born. But in preparation for the birth of their second child,
Agnes returned to her parents' little home in Shuttle Row,
Blantyre, where she herself had been born, and which has since
become one of the most frequented places of pilgrimage in the
British Isles. David was the second son of a family which grew
to comprise five sons (two of whom died young) and two
daughters. But as these two sons died in infancy, there was
a gap of six years between David and his sister Janet; then
came Charles and Agnes. It is a curious fact that his father was
also one of a family of five sons and two daughters, as was also
his father-in-law, Robert Moffat.

That little home was one of twenty-four "single kitchens" in
the top flat of a three-storied tenement building for factory
workers, situated on a high bank of the Clyde, overlooking the
factory and the river beneath, and beyond them the higher
bank with its grove of oaks and ash-trees bordering the Both-
well estate. Each of these rooms is of dimensions fourteen feet
by ten: sufficient accommodation for one family for all pur-
poses--living, cooking, sleeping. It contains recesses for two
large beds: one for the parents, the other for the children. The
bedsteads stand high enough for the stowage of truckle-beds
beneath them; these could be pulled out at night if required,
in which case nearly all the floor-space would be occupied. To
us to-day life in such conditions would be considered unlivable,
but it was the accustomed lot of factory-hands a century ago
and better far than the cribbed "but an' ben" of the crofter in
the open fields: the hardship to them was not in confined
quarters but in the drudgery of long hours and scant pay. And
yet with all its disadvantages "the management was paternal",
and Blantyre was in its day a model village. Nor, in the case
of the Livingstone family, were the conditions as bad as might
appear, since John and David when in their 'teens were lodged
with their grandparents in a neighbouring cottage.

Little now remains of the long line of factory buildings by
the river, and nothing of the once populous dwellinghouses on
the high ground above them--save only Shuttle Row. For more

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