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.