The bag on such occasions was not always made for the purpose, for there is a story that once when he had captured a fish in the "salmon pool," and was not prepared to transport such a prize, he deposited it in the leg of his brother Charles's trousers, creating no little sympathy for the boy as he passed through the village with his sadly swollen leg! It was about his twentieth year that the great spiritual change took place which determined the course of Livingstone's future life.

But before this time he had earnest thoughts on religion.

"Great pains," he says in his first book, "had been taken by my parents to instill the doctrines of Christianity into my mind, and I had no difficulty in understanding the theory of a free salvation by the atonement of our Saviour; but it was only about this time that I began to feel the necessity and value of a personal application of the provisions of that atonement to my own case[5]." Some light is thrown on this brief account in a paper submitted by him to the Directors of the London Missionary Society in 1838, in answer to a schedule of queries sent down by them when he offered himself as a missionary for their service.

He says that about his twelfth year he began to reflect on his state as a sinner, and became anxious to realize the state of mind that flows from the reception of the truth into the heart.

He was deterred, however, from embracing the free offer of mercy in the gospel, by a sense of unworthiness to receive so great a blessing, till a supernatural change should be effected in him by the Holy Spirit.