Having got my forty-four new village schools raised, and two thousand four hundred children gathered into them, the next thing was to get teachers. Where was I to find them? It had been difficult enough to provide for the few schools of former years. ‘Take what you have and you’ll never want,’ ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ are good old sayings. On these I acted. There were a few old soldiers in the district who knew the alphabet and understood discipline. I appointed a number of them village schoolmasters at the enormous salary of one shilling a month! That was poor pay, but then it was poor teaching; the pay and the teaching were about equal. But my soldier-schoolmasters earned their one shilling a month, and as they got no pay as soldiers they were glad to get even one shilling a month; and I could have got a hundred of them at that figure if I had wanted them. As I have said, they earned their money; for they taught the alphabet well, and they maintained discipline in the schools. This was of the greatest importance, as it is utterly neglected in Malagasy families. I have seen boys even in Britain whom I could have wished to place under my soldier-schoolmasters for six months. They would have taught them what discipline meant, and how to behave themselves. [Illustration: ANALAKELY: CHURCH AND MARKET-PLACE. THE PIAZZA, ANDOHALO.] 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.