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294 VISITS TO MADAGASCAR. CHAP. XI. A young officer, travelling from the capital to the coast, stopped at my house to-day, to offer any assistance he could render, as well as to hear and tell the news. He asked a number of questions, and, amongst others, whether I could make balloons; for he said there was a French resident at the capital who could make balloons go up in the air, with fire inside, and could make looking-glasses, and cast cannon. When I acknowledged my inferiority to the French gentle man in all these respects, he added: “ But you can take likenesses, for I have seen some, and you have medicine.” He had brought me a trifling present, and asked for a little medicine for the fever, which I promised to send him. When he shook hands with me on leaving, I could not but pity the poor fellow, for his hand was burning with fever at the time. The natives, from the high and healthy provinces in the interior, suffer in the low regions of the country quite as much as Europeans do from the fever, of which they enter tain great dread. The next morning we resumed our journey. The road out of the village was quite as had as that by which we had entered. In descending the hill my bearers sank nearly knee deep in mud, and, on reaching the bottom, they had to cross a wide piece of water reaching up to their waists, and then make their way along the edges of a series of soft- flooded rice grounds. This was the only road from the vil lage. We next crossed a succession of low, clayey hills, and their intervening valleys, where the watercourse at the bottom was often widened out to join a rice plantation. Voitsara, the first village we passed, was almost surrounded by plantations, fenced with stakes of a fine species of eryth- rina, many of which seemed to have taken root in the prolific soil, and thus sent forth large branches, bearing numerous clusters of rich, scarlet flowers. At the next village, Maroomby, considerable portions of