55] The home in which David Livingstone grew up was bright and happy, and presented a remarkable example of all the domestic virtues.

It was ruled by an industry that never lost an hour of the six days, and that welcomed and honored the day of rest; a thrift that made the most of everything, though it never got far beyond the bare necessaries of life; a self-restraint that admitted no stimulant within the door, and that faced bravely and steadily all the burdens of life; a love of books that showed the presence of a cultivated taste, with a fear of God that dignified the life which it moulded and controlled.

To the last David Livingstone was proud of the class from which he sprang.

When the highest in the land were showering compliments on him, he was writing to his old friends of "my own order, the honest poor," and trying, by schemes of colonization and otherwise, to promote their benefit.

He never had the least hankering for any title or distinction that would have seemed to lift him out of his own class; and it was with perfect sincerity that on the tombstone which he placed over the resting-place of his parents in the cemetery of Hamilton, he expressed his feelings in these words, deliberately refusing to change the "and" of the last line into "but": TO SHOW THE RESTING-PLACE OF NEIL LIVINGSTONE, AND AGNES HUNTER, HIS WIFE, AND TO EXPEESS THE THANKFULNESS TO GOD OF THEIR CHILDREN, JOHN, DAVID, JANET, CHARLES, AND AGNES, FOR POOR AND PIOUS PARENTS.
David Livingstone's birthday was the 19th March, 1813.