234 VISITS TO MADAGASCAR. chap. ix. 



the school, upwards of eighty in number, and encouraged 

 their indefatigable teacher to persevere, in the hope of peace 

 and of better days to come. We also took leave of the 

 people, many of whom were assembled in the church. The 

 whole company walked with us through the settlement. 

 WTien we reached the brow of a hill by the high-road, the 

 women and girls who were standing on both sides of the road 

 began to sing one of their hymns referring to a future 

 meeting in another world. Before they had finished many 

 an eye was suffused with tears, and it may well be supposed 

 that I was not unaffected by the scene. 



From the rising ground on which I stood I looked over the 

 fertile and undulated valley, guarded on two sides by the 

 lofty summits of the Winterberg and the Katberg, at the 

 base of which the Kat river, bordered with flowers, rippled 

 and dashed along, falling over rocks and winding with 

 several bends through the settlement, watering in its course 

 the fields and gardens of the people, now either brown with 

 the stalks of the gathered grain or covered with corn nearly 

 ripe. Here and there two or three goats browsed among the 

 bushes, or stood perched upon the crumbling rocks, while 

 the few cattle which war and disease had left grazed among 

 the thick, tall grass in the unenclosed parts of the settlement, 

 tended by a Hottentot or Caffre boy and his dog. In the 

 centre of this scene stood the bare walls of the large old 

 church, with a smaller and more recent erection by its side, 

 and a little farther off the roofless houses of the missionaries. 

 A large black bird like a raven was perched on the gable end 

 of one of the bare walls; weeds and flowers were grooving 

 within the vacant rooms ; the blackened trunks of trees left 

 standing, and the vigorous shoots springing from the stumps 

 of those which had been felled, revealed the devastation that 

 had been made in the orchards and gardens around. Besides 

 these the ruins of former habitations of the people appeared 



