Her son loved her, and in many ways followed her.

It was the genial, gentle influences that had moved him under his mother's training that enabled him to move the savages of Africa.
She, too, had a great store of family traditions, and, like the mother of Sir Walter Scott, she retained the power of telling them with the utmost accuracy to a very old age.

In one of Livingstone's private journals, written in 1864, during his second visit home, he gives at full length one of his mother's stories, which some future Macaulay may find useful as an illustration of the social condition of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century: "Mother told me stories of her youth: they seem to come back to her in her eighty-second year very vividly.

Her grandfather, Gavin Hunter, could write, while most common people were ignorant of the art.

A poor woman got him to write a petition to the minister of Shotts parish to augment her monthly allowance of sixpence, as she could not live on it.
He was taken to Hamilton jail for this, and having a wife and three children at home, who without him would certainly starve, he thought of David's feigning madness before the Philistines, and beslabbered his beard with saliva.