Our letters lay at Tàmatàve for six months, until the British government demanded that they should be given up. They were all opened, our papers and magazines were burned, and the London Missionary Society annual warrant of expenditure for the Imèrina district committee was never forthcoming. Perhaps it was supposed by its non-arrival the Methodist missionaries--who were believed to be inciting the Hovas to resistance--would be starved out; but we simply borrowed the money needed, and quietly went on with our work, which flourished and made progress, notwithstanding all the troubles. Meetings to pray for peace were established at centres, and it was most pathetic to listen to the Malagasy pleading for their invaders, that God would bring them to a right mind, and take them safely home to their own land. The conduct of Captain Johnstone of H.B.M. ship ‘Dryad’ during that trying time was beyond all praise. He called at the various ports for our mails, taking away any British subjects who wished to leave the island, sent up letters and papers to us in the interior, and protected and defended British subjects and interests in a way and in a spirit for which he ought to have been made an admiral; but instead of that--as we afterwards learned, to our sorrow--he was censured. CHAPTER XIII BIBLE REVISION AND ‘AN OLD DISCIPLE’ ‘In the latter days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and peoples shall flow unto it.’--MICAH iv. 1. I became a member of the Committee for the Revision of the Malagasy Bible in 1883, and remained a member for four years--till the finish of the work. This duty proved most interesting and enjoyable. The revision was not the triumph that the translation made by the first missionaries had been--partly, I think, because it had been overlauded, which led the people to expect too much from it; partly because, while a more correct and literal translation, it was, in consequence, not so idiomatic, and perhaps because the paragraph form in which it was printed was not so popular, at least in the schools, as the old form in verses. It occupies much the same place among the Malagasy that the Revised English Version does among ourselves, with this difference, that it is the only version which the Malagasy can now obtain.