118 
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 chief’s 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 folded 
one of the sheets; the chief then raised himself upon his mat 
and dictated while his secretary wrote a reply. When the letter 
was finished the secretary read it aloud* and* the chief having 
approved* 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 accu¬ 
racy and ease the instructions of his superior; and while 
