When, a little more than a month later, the coffin of Livingstone was
landed in England, April 15, it was felt that no less a shrine than
Britain's greatest burial-place could fitly hold such precious dust. But so
improbable and incredible did it seem that a few rude Africans could
actually have done this splendid deed, at such a cost of time and such
risk, that not until the fractured bones of the arm, which the lion crushed
at Jabotsa thirty years before, identified the body, was certain that this
was Livingstone's corpse. And then, on the eighteenth of April, 1874, such
a funeral cortege entered the great abbey of Britain's illustrious dead as
few warriors or heroes or princes ever drew to that mausoleum.
The faithful body-servants who had religiously brought home every relic of
the person or property of the great missionary explorer were accorded
places of honor. And well they might be. No triumphal procession of earth's
mightiest conqueror ever equaled for sublimity that lonely journey through
Africa's forests. An example of tenderness, gratitude, devotion, heroism,
equal to this, the world had never seen.
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