lis VISITS TO MADAGASCAR. chap. v. 



I found the chief lying on a number of mats spread by the 

 side of the fire-place. His wife was sitting near the doorway 

 working at a fine kind of mat. One slave was in the outer 

 room driving away the poultry and pigs as they approached, 

 and another little slave girl squatting on the ground attended 

 to the fire. The chief said he had removed to this low close 

 hut for the sake of the warmth : the thermometer at that 

 time was generally between 60° and 70° in-doors. He was 

 an officer of the government, and while I was talking with 

 him one of his assistants or aides-de-camp entered with a 

 couple of letters, which, at the chiefs request, he read, and 

 which the chief told him he must answer. The young man 

 then went to a box at the side of the room, brought paper, 

 pen, and ink, and seating himself cross-legged on the ground 

 near the lamp laid a quire of paper on his knee, and having 

 folded a sheet the chief raised himself upon his mat and dic- 

 tated while his secretary wrote a reply. "VMien the letter was 

 finished the secretary read it aloud, and, the chief having ap- 

 proved, the writer brushed the sand adhering to his naked 

 foot with the feathery end of his long pen upon the freshly 

 written sheet to prevent its blotting, then folded his letter 

 and departed to despatch it to its destination. There was 

 something singularly novel and suggestive as to the processes 

 by which the civilisation of nations is promoted in the spec- 

 tacle I had witnessed. Little more than thirty years before 

 the language of Madagascar was an unwritten language; a 

 native who had been educated at Mauritius was the only 

 writer in the country, and he wrote in a foreign tongue ; but 

 now, without any of the appliances which are usually con- 

 nected with a secretary's desk or office, a quiet, unpretending 

 young man, seated on a mat on the floor in a low dark cottage 

 three hundred miles from the capital of the country, and 

 with his paper on his knee, receives and writes with accuracy 

 and ease the orders or instructions of his superior; and while 



