Their occupations are, chiefly, tending cattle, growing rice, fishing, and making _tòaka_ (rum). Almost every family keeps cattle, save the very poorest, and there is nothing the people like better than to follow their herds and camp out in the pastures with their wives and children. The day of cutting the ears of the young animals (so as to distinguish them from those of the queen) was always kept as a day of rejoicing, killing oxen, and feasting. Yet very few milk their cattle, for they prefer the broth made from fish to milk. [Sidenote: STORING RICE] As we went round the outside edge of the plain, we saw a large extent of rice ground under cultivation; but the people do not dig the soil, or transplant the rice, as is the custom in Imèrina, but cultivate their fields in the following way. First of all they make a number of low earthen banks, which are intended to hold the water. That being done, oxen are driven over the ground to be planted, where the water is a few inches deep, and when the soil has been well turned over, then the rice is sown; and there it is left until it is reaped, without transplanting or weeding. When the rice has been reaped, it is heaped together in round stacks, which are of a considerable size. When quite dry, the grain is threshed out with a stick, two men or more striking in regular turn. The rice is not stored in pits, as in Imèrina, but in an enormous kind of basket or round enclosure, made of papyrus plaited together, and about eight feet high and from twenty to thirty feet in diameter. These are in the fields, and are roofed over; and rice being so cheap and plentiful with them, the people do not measure the rice itself, but they reckon it by the number of these _vòlovàry_, of which the richer Sihànaka have seven or eight or more. [Sidenote: CATCHING FISH] Catching fish in the lake and in the numerous streams and pieces of water is the business of both men and women. The men angle for eels, the women dredge for small fish in the shallow water (using a kind of basket like a large sieve), and the little children fish with bait. All the children have a tiny canoe, in which they go fishing in the early morning from six to nine o’clock, when they return home, for their small canoes would be upset by the wind and waves as the day advances. The women catch, by dredging, small fish called _tòho_ and also shrimps. These they dry in the sun, sew up in baskets, and take for sale to the markets, many people becoming wealthy by their sale. Until a few years ago all sales were done by barter, for little money was employed. And it is the custom for the men not to bring home what they have caught, but to leave it by the waterside for the women to fetch.