1 IS 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. When 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