‘And they shall not teach every man his fellow-citizen, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know Me, from the least to the greatest of them.’--HEBREWS viii. 11. I got a fellow missionary to visit our station once a month for six months to teach singing. The class, which was conducted on the sol-fa notation, did our people much good. They enjoyed singing and learned the system readily, and our congregational singing vastly improved. I continued the class to the best of my ability, after the Bible-class on the Friday afternoons. It proved a great attraction, as many as from two hundred to two hundred and fifty attending. The Malagasy are fond of singing, and they sing remarkably well, considering the very small amount of training they have had. Their beautiful language also lends itself readily to music. Malagasy abounds in vowel sounds and in liquid consonants. Its soft and musical flow has earned for it the name of the Italian of the southern hemisphere. It well deserves the name. It was refreshing to see and hear two hundred, from lisping childhood to grey old age, singing with heart and voice: ‘There is a happy land,’ ‘Oh, that will be joyful,’ ‘Rock of Ages,’ ‘Jesus, the Good Shepherd,’ and other well-known hymns. At one of these singing-classes, at which we had been practising some new hymns, I asked Razàka how he liked the new hymns. ‘I like them all very well,’ but, he added--the tears meantime flowing down his furrowed cheeks--‘I like best, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me.”’ ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘that’s the truth that touches the hearts of all God’s people of whatever clime or colour. That has the kernel of the Gospel.’ All the things that go in pairs in Madagascar are called _mivàdy_, i.e. mated, matched, married--literally, husband and wife. Thus a pair of gloves are _mivàdy_, the same with a pair of socks, or boots, or shoes. The idea is that of completion. The one is regarded as the complement of the other. The same idea was applied by our people to a hymn and its tune. They were _mivàdy_--united, mated, married. The hymn was regarded as the husband, and the tune as its _vàdy_, wife. Every hymn must have its own tune, its own _vàdy_, wife, and our people would not allow of their separation, their ‘divorce,’ as they called it. I did not know of this idea of theirs for years, and cannot say whether the natives in other parts of the island hold the same view of the matter; but our people in Vònizòngo certainly did. I found this out at one of our singing-classes.