Notwithstanding the beauty of this part of the country, it is very unhealthy for foreigners. The rivers, as we have seen, all communicate with the lagoons, and during the rainy season great quantities of decaying matter are brought down from the forests. The large extent of marsh and stagnant water in the lakes breed millions of mosquitoes, and so give rise to the dreaded malarial fever. The earlier accounts of the French and Portuguese settlements on the coast of Madagascar represent this as a frightful scourge, sweeping off a large proportion of the soldiers and settlers at their forts. From this, the Isle Ste Marie was called the “Grave of the French,” and “the Churchyard” and “Dead Island” of the Dutch. But the use of quinine and modern precautions against mosquito bites have done much to mitigate the attacks of fever, and since the draining of the marshes near Tamatave the town is said to be fairly healthy. The Bétsimisàraka inhabitants of this coast are accustomed to place their dead in rude coffins hollowed out of the trunk of a tree and covered with a roof-shaped lid. But these are not buried, but are placed on the ground in little groups, in a sheltered grove of trees. In the case of wealthy people, the coffins are put on a kind of trestle, and sometimes are protected from the rain by having a shed fixed over them. This custom, it may be imagined, is not, for the living, a pleasant mode of disposing of the departed, and the presence of these little cemeteries may often be deduced from the effluvium, even if they are not seen. During the dry season one constantly meets with groups of people carrying up the remains of their relatives, Hova who have died on the coast, in order that they may be buried in their ancestral tombs. Sometimes we have had our midday meal, or have stopped for the night, in houses against whose outer walls these wrapped-up corpses, fastened to long poles for carriage, have been leaning. At one place where we stayed the people were making cakes for the funeral feast, and in pounding the rice for these the women made a special rhythmical beat of their pestles on the top of the rice mortar, as well as on the meal in the hollow of the mortar. [Sidenote: SNAKES]