chap. vi. 
DOMESTIC SLAVERY IN MADAGASCAR, 
147 
men in the court or yard; one of them asked me if I did not 
want to buy a boy, pointing to a nice, healthy-looking lad, 
scarcely twelve years of age, who stood behind him, and 
whom he called to come forward and show himself. On my 
shaking my head and intimating that I did not want a 
slave, it was explained that it was not temporary service 
that was offered, but that the boy would work for me all 
his life, or could be sold to another, and that the price was 
only ten dollars, little more than two pounds English money. 
My continued refusal left no hope of the lad being sold to 
me, and they soon went away, followed by their slave, whose 
appearance interested me much, and excited strong feelings of 
commiseration towards one in whose breast all the ardent 
aspirations of youth, with the prospects of happiness and con¬ 
tentment in after life must be stifled by the stern reality that 
he would never be his own, but must, until death should release 
him from his bondage, render unrequited labour to another. 
The price of a male slave was from seventy to one hundred 
dollars, and of a female slave from twenty to forty dollars. 
From the little which I saw of the domestic slaves in 
Madagascar, I should think their condition vastly superior 
to that of the severe labour and suffering which characterised 
the slavery of our West Indian colonies, yet I occasionally saw 
some of the inevitable consequences of the system that were 
perhaps more revolting in their moral degradation than in the 
physical suffering inflicted. In one of the houses which I 
entered one day, a number of female slaves were at work. 
Some of them were carrying baskets of cotton or other 
articles from one room to another, and, as they passed along, 
I saw one young girl who had a couple of boards fixed on 
her shoulders, each of them rather more than two feet 
long, and ten inches or a foot wide, fastened together by 
pieces of wood nailed on the under side. A piece had been 
cut out of each board in the middle, so that, when fixed 
