century, when on 19 March 1813 David Livingstone opened
his eyes upon a world in which the balance might yet swing
either way.

He came of a hardy stock of poor crofters whose forebears had
for generations wrested a meagre subsistence from the rocky
soil of one of two small islands, Ulva, off the western coast of
Mull. The other is Iona and thence, according to a Gaelic
tradition, the clan of Mac an Leigh--"sons of the physician"
(anglicized no doubt to an equivalent of Leighs-ton and cor-
rupted in pronunciation)--had peopled the western Highlands
from the time of St. Columba and one may suppose that it
would have given him a passing whimsical pleasure to indulge
the fancy that the noble art of healing was, even if remotely, in
his blood.

One of his earliest memories was that of listening entranced
to his grandfather's tales of bygone days, but of these there was
only one which he thought worth recording. It was the precept
bequeathed by a nameless worthy of their line to his children
on his death-bed in the form of a motto which "ran in our
blood": Be Honest.

His grandfather, Neil Livingston, certainly practised it and
his trustworthiness earned him in old age a comfortable pension
from the Blantyre cotton factory. He had also, said his grandson,
a sense of the value of education, and never grudged the price
of a school-book to any of his children. Of these there were
seven--five sons and two daughters. All his sons served as
sailors or soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars, except the youngest,
Neil.

Neil Livingston the younger was born in 1788 and began life
as a clerk in the cotton-factory which had been taken over in
1792 by James Monteith, "who maintained its kindly tradi-
tions". But he was soon apprenticed by his father to David
Hunter (an old friend who like himself had been an impecu-
nious crofter) in the tailoring department of the firm. The firm
subsidized the education of its apprentices in the local school,
and Neil's sons later had the benefit of the same privilege,
a boon for which one of them at least never ceased to be
grateful.

The Hunters were staunch Covenanters of Lowland breed,
and of antecedents as humble as the Livingstons. As a result of

-14-