He read these words of Stanley's:
"For four months and four days I lived with Livingstone in the
same house, or in the same boat, or in the same tent, and I never
found a fault in him.... Each day's life with him added to my
admiration for him. His gentleness never forsakes him: his
hopefulness never deserts him. His is the Spartan heroism, the
inflexibility of the Roman, the enduring resolution of the
Anglo-Saxon. The man has conquered me."
Alexander Mackay put down Stanley's book and gazed into the fire.
Since the days when he had trudged as a boy down to the station to see
the railway engine he had been a schoolboy in the Grammar School at
Aberdeen, and a student in Edinburgh, and while there had worked in
the great shipbuilding yards at Leith amid the clang and roar of the
rivetters and the engine shop. He was now studying in Berlin, drawing
the designs of great engines far more wonderful than the railway
engine he had almost worshipped as a boy.
On the desk at Mackay's side lay his diary in which he wrote his
thoughts. In that diary were the words that he himself had written:
"This day last year[52] Livingstone died--a Scotsman and a
Christian--loving God and his neighbour, in the heart of Africa.
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