Boy's Column.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XX, Issue 2058, 22 April 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

Boy's Column.

B(»>s Who Became Famous.

BY DAVID KER

Tub Story of Africa,

“ Well, J used to think no one could do two things well at once, but that hoy seems to to have managed it and no mistake,” So spoke an English traveller who was inspecting one of the great cotton-mills in the west of Scotland, not far from Glasgow. And well might ho say so. The lad whom he was watching a pale, thin, bright-eyed boy, employed in the mill as a “pieccr”—had fixed a small hook to the framework of the spinning-jenny, and seemed to snatch a brief sentence from its pages every time ho passed it in the course of his work. “Ay, lie’s jist a wonder, yon laddie,” answered the Scotch foreman, to whom the visitor had addressed himself. “We ca’ him ‘ Busy Davie ’ here, for lie’s aye read,readin’likeony minister ; but hedoes his wark weel for a’ that.” “ And does ho really understand what he reads ? ” asked the Englishman, looking wonderingly at the young student’s hook, which was a treatise on medicine and surgery that would have puzzled most lads four or five years older than himself. “I’s warrant he does that" replied the Scot, with an emphatic nod. “There’s no a quicker duel than Davie i’ the hail mill. And then the visitor passed on to look at another part of the works, and forgot all about ‘ Busy Davie ’ for the time being. But he was suddenly reminded of him two hours later, when the mill hands “ knocked off ” for dinner. Coming back across the yard when his tour of inspection was over, the traveller caught sight of a small figure in a corner by itself, which lie thought lie recognized. A second glance showed him that he was not mistaken. There sat “ Busy Davie,” holding in one hand the big oat-meal “ bannock ” that represented his dinner, and in the other a soiled and tattered book without a cover, which he was devouring so eagerly that his food remained almost untouched. The Englishman stole softly up behind the absorbed boy, and glancing over his shoulder at the hook, saw that it was written by himself a few years before, describing the most perilous of all his journeys through the wild regions beyond the Orange River in South Africa. -lust as the visitor came up, the little student, quite unaware that the author of the hook was standing beside him, read half aloud one of the more exciting passages, following the lines with his roughened forefinger; “ ‘ 'The progress of our party was necessarily very slow, as we could only march in the mornings and evenings, and the wheels of the waggons often sank up to the very axle in the loose sand. In some places the heat was so great that the grass actually crumbled to dust in our fingers. More than once our supply of water ran out altogether, and men and beasts staggered onward over the hot, dusty, neverending plain, with parched tongues and bloodshot eyes, silent and despairing.’ ” At the thought of these difficulties, which he himself was one day to meet and overcome as few men have ever done before or after him, the hoy’s thin face hardened into a look of indomitable firmness which was its habitual expression in after-life. But it softened into a smile the next moment, as ho read as follows ; “ ‘ In several of the places where wo camped our chief food was a species of large frog, called by the natives “ mattlometto,” which was kind enough to assist us in our hunts for it by setting up such a tremendous croaking that we could easily Hud it, even in the dark.’ ” Here the boy turned over a leaf, and came suddenly upon a startling picture of a man lying prostrate on the ground, with a lion’s fore-paw planted on his chest, and its teeth fastened in his shoulder, while several negroes, with terrified faces, were seen making off as fast as possible iu the background. “ How would you like to travel through a country like (hut, my lad?” asked the explorer. “It would be rough work, wouldn't it. “ I wad like wool to gang there, for a’ that,” answered the boy, “for there’s nuickle to be done .there yet.” “ There is indeed, and it’s just fellows of i/our sort that we need to do it," said the traveller, clapping him on thushoulder. “ If you ever </« go to Africa, HI be bound it will take more than a lion in your way to stop you.” The whole world now knows how strangely those lightly spoken words were fulfilled twenty-eight years later, when that boy il»l actually come alive out of the jaws of the hungry African lion, which had broken his arm with its tooth, to finish those wonderful explorations that tilled the civilized world with the fame of Dr. David Livingstone.