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. 
When 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, wateriug 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 settle¬ 
ment, tended by a Hottentot 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 growing 
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 
