VISITS TO MADAGASCAR. CHAP. IX. 234 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 Winterherg 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, watering 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 settlement, tended by a Hottentot or Caffre hoy 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