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CHAr. 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 commisseration 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 L 2