hazards, in the event of his decease? Did not his great ruling
passion suggest some such precaution?"

Fair questions, but, reader, you have all--every word written, spoken,
or implied.

Is there, then, no explanation? Yes; we think past experience affords
it, and it is offered to you by one who remembers moreover how
Livingstone himself used to point out to him in Africa the peculiar
features of death by malarial poisoning.

In full recollection of eight deaths in the Zambesi and Shire districts,
not a single parting word or direction in any instance can be recalled.
Neither hope nor courage give way as death approaches. In most cases a
comatose state of exhaustion supervenes, which, if it be not quickly
arrested by active measures, passes into complete insensibility: this is
almost invariably the closing scene.

In Dr. Livingstone's case we find some departure from the ordinary
symptoms.[35] He, as we have seen by the entry of the 18th April was
alive to the conviction that malarial poison is the basis of every
disorder in Tropical Africa, and he did not doubt but that he was fully
under its influence whilst suffering so severely. As we have said, a man
of less endurance in all probability would have perished in the first
week of the terrible approach to the Lake, through the flooded country
and under the continual downpour that he describes. It tried every
constitution, saturated every man with fever poison, and destroyed
several, as we shall see a little further on. The greater vitality in
his iron system very likely staved off for a few days the last state of
coma to which we refer, but there is quite sufficient to show us that
only a thin margin lay between the heavy drowsiness of the last few days
before reaching Chitambo's and the final and usual symptom that brings
on unconsciousness and inability to speak.

On more closely questioning the men one only elicits that they imagine
he hoped to recover as he had so often done before, and if this really
was the case it will in a measure account for the absence of anything
like a dying statement, but still they speak again and again of his
drowsiness, which in itself would take away all ability to realize
vividly the seriousness of the situation. It may be that at the last a
flash of conviction for a moment lit up the mind--if so, what greater
consolation can those have who mourn his loss, than the account that the
men give of what they saw when they entered the