He made no cry nor disturbance, but having procured a piece of bread, sat down contentedly to pass the night on the doorstep.

There, on looking out, his mother found him.

It was an early application of the rule which did him such service in later days, to make the best of the least pleasant situations.

But no one could yet have thought how the rule was to be afterward applied.

Looking back to this period, Livingstone might have said, in the words of the old Scotch ballad: "O little knew my mother, The day she cradled me, The lands that I should wander o'er, The death that I should dee." At the age of nine he got a New Testament from his Sunday-school teacher for repeating the 119th Psalm on two successive evenings with only five errors, a proof that perseverance was bred in his very bone.
His parents were poor, and at the age of ten he was put to work in the factory as a piecer, that his earnings might aid his mother in the struggle with the wolf which had followed the family from the island that bore its name.