After returning home from Antsihànaka, I heard many other particulars about the people and their habits, and among them the following curious, and cruel, custom with regard to widows; and as this is so utterly different from anything practised by any other Malagasy tribe, as far as I am aware, it is well to put it on record. It is much more like a Hindu custom than a Malagasy one, and is as follows:—When the corpse of the deceased husband is about to be buried, the widow is decorated profusely with all the ornaments she possesses, wearing a scarlet _làmba_, with beads and silver chains on her neck and wrists and ankles, long ear-rings depending from her ears to her shoulders, and silver ornaments on her head. Then she is placed in the house, so that it may be seen by everyone how her husband adorned her while he was yet living; and when the people go away to the funeral, she remains still in the house, and does not go to the grave. When the relatives and friends have returned home and seen the widow sitting in her grand clothing and ornaments, they rush upon her, tearing her dress and violently pulling off her ornaments, so as to hurt her, and say at the same time: “This is the cause of our losing our relative”; for they believe that the _vìntana_—_i.e._ fate or luck of the wife—is stronger than that of her husband and so has caused his death. Then they give her a coarse _làmba_, a spoon with a broken handle, and a round dish with the stand broken off; her hair is dishevelled, and she is covered up with a coarse mat; and under it she remains all day long, and can only leave it at night; and whoever goes into the house, the widow may not speak to them. She is not allowed to wash her face or her hands, but only the tips of her fingers. She endures all this sometimes for a year, or at least for eight months; and even then, her time of mourning is not ended, but endures for a considerable time afterwards. And she is not allowed to go home to her own relatives until she has been divorced first by the husband’s family. The house in which people die is left by the survivors, and no one occupies it again; they do not pull it down, but let it fall to pieces of itself, but they do not leave the village as do the Sàkalàva in similar circumstances. Such houses are called _tràno fòlaka_ (“broken houses”); but I am informed that this last custom is falling into disuse; and happily, the influence of Christian teaching has caused the treatment of widows to be greatly altered, so that it is now becoming a thing of the past. After leaving the “village of many poles,” our afternoon journey was southward, first crossing several spurs of the higher hills with their intermediate valleys; and then down a long level tract of country between the lake and a bold wall-like line of hills, which here forms the eastern boundary of the plain. We passed several large villages, and stopped for the night at a place of forty or fifty houses, called Ambòhimànga.