As an example of how well they taught discipline I may mention that one day, after we had removed our station school up from the new church to the new school-house in our own yard, I went down and found three boys there after the school had been dismissed. I asked why they had not gone home when the school broke up, and they replied that they had been left, while the schoolmaster went to his dinner, to learn their lesson, as they had not known it properly. I asked them if they had learned it; they said they had, and I then asked for what they were waiting. They said they were waiting for the schoolmaster to return from his dinner to hear their lesson. These boys were sitting in an unfinished school-house; it had neither doors nor windows, only the walls and the roof, and yet they did not dream of running away.

Of course I very soon found that by such appointments—although the only ones then possible—I had only removed my difficulties a step. Soon there were a series of deputations to ask for more advanced masters. I often heard a knock at the outside door of my study, and opened it to find some six or eight half-naked Malagasy boys. To my inquiry as to what they wanted, they said they were a deputation sent to see me on business. I invited them into my study. The boy who had been appointed spokesman then stood up and addressed me as follows: ‘May you reach old age, sir, may you never be weakly, may you reach grey hairs with your wife and family!’ ‘Yes,’ I answered on these occasions, ‘thank you for your good wishes; now what is the business?’ When you are saluted in that elaborate way, you may be certain that there is something of importance to follow. The lad continued, ‘We have been appointed as a deputation by the school at such a village to wait upon you, and ask for a schoolmaster.’ I would then look up my book, to find, of course, that they had a soldier-schoolmaster. My reply usually took this form: ‘You have a teacher at that village.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ the lad would answer, ‘but he can’t read, and we can, and so we want a schoolmaster who can read!’

Of course, with teachers who could not read, you could hardly expect the schools to make very rapid progress. There was nothing for it but to take some twenty of the brightest boys from the various schools to my own station, give them a few months’ special training, and then send them out as teachers—to teach a month, and then return and learn a month—and while they were teaching they got a penny a day. Some of the sharpest of them were then picked out, and passed on to the normal school at the capital, where they get a two years’ training. A grant of sixpence a week was obtained for their support while at the normal school; and before we left on our first furlough there were sixteen trained teachers at work in the district, and most of them have been at work there since—some as teachers, others as pastors, and others as evangelists. A large government school of some four hundred boys is now taught in that school-house built in the manse yard. The three principal native teachers in that school are old lads of ours that had been sent to the capital for a normal school training.

The activity in regard to the schools in our district startled the western district into activity; then the districts to the south and the east, and other districts, followed suit, and soon there was a greatly increased number of schools at work all over the central provinces.

Twenty-four lads went up to the normal school entrance examination in 1874, but only six passed. Also two of our best and most capable women were sent to the hospital to be trained as nurses. After their return they did a good and much-needed work in the district for many years. It took time and hard fighting, however, to overcome the old heathen practices. Prejudices and superstitions die hard. Under the old heathen methods, fully a third of the women died during ‘nature’s hour of sorrow’; but our trained nurses soon made a great change in that respect, and so established their reputation.

A vast amount of splendid and much needed work was done at the Medical Mission Hospital for over thirty years by the various Medical Missionaries in charge of it. Perhaps the most thorough and valuable service rendered even there was the work done by the Matron Miss Byam (the Miss Nightingale of Madagascar), daughter of the late General Byam, in the training of a staff of Malagasy nurses. Nothing more effective in connexion with the Mission was ever done in the island.

CHAPTER VIII
DISTRICT JOURNEYS AND INCIDENTS

‘Happy is the people, that is in such a case: yea, happy is the people, whose God is the Lord.’—Psalm cxliv. 15,

The year 1875 was by far the best since we came, in work done and progress made, in schools established, in money raised, in enlarged congregations, and in the fewness of scandals. We had to remember for our comfort that we were but breaking up the fallow ground, preparing the soil and sowing the seed of the Kingdom, and that it was too soon to look for a harvest. We found that there was great truth in the remark that ‘after a religious creed has been established in a community’—as to some extent at least it had been in Vònizòngo—‘the preacher educates gradually, far oftener than he converts suddenly.’

By degrees the Gospel became a power in the land. Old things passed away, and all things became new. The whole face of society was quietly revolutionized, and changes effected in matters social, political, and religious. Everything in fact, from the fireside to the forum, and from the queen on the throne to the prisoner in chains, felt the new influence. It was perhaps a matter for more thankfulness than we were always prepared to admit, that we had experienced so little of the sensational, the startling, and the marvellous; although from another point of view, the work might well be deemed a marvellous transformation.