Our mission district of Anativolo, where we had fourteen preaching stations, with their small village schools, under the charge of three untrained evangelists, was utterly ruined during the year 1888 by a band of brigands from the forests of the north. They came as far south as within forty miles of the capital! At one village in the Vònizòngo district four men were killed, and thirty women and children carried off to be sold to the Sakalava tribe on the west coast. It was five years before we got these mission stations in Anativolo restored; then the march of the French expedition from the north-west coast, and after that the rising against the French rule, ruined the work for another three years, and the district is now so sparsely populated that I fear it will never again be what it was. We left the capital in April, 1888, for the small London Missionary Society sanatorium on the hills at Ambàtovòry for our annual month’s holiday. I had seldom looked forward with more longing to our month of rest, expected more from it or received less. On the night of Wednesday, May 9 (the night of the large local weekly market for the neighbourhood), I was sitting reading in our small parlour. About ten o’clock my attention was attracted by a slight scratching at the Venetian shutter-door of the French window, which opened on to the walk. I looked up from my book, and thought that the cat had been shut out. I turned again to my book. I had hardly done so, however, when with a crash the Venetian shutter-door was torn open, the French window burst in, and a band of burglars sprang into the room, and I saw the gleam of their long Malagasy knives and meat-axes! So utterly unexpected was the thing that I was stupefied for a few seconds. I scarcely realized what had happened. As I had been sitting opposite the open door of the room I sprang through it, closing it behind me, to which act I may have owed my life, although I hardly think they would have harmed me, unless I had offered resistance. I rushed upstairs to the bedroom, where I found my wife in a state of terror; she had been startled from sleep by the crash. She thought the house had been struck by lightning. I had taken my small bull-dog revolver with me for mad dogs, with which we were rather bothered in those days (I had shot five of them in our own yard during our first term, and one in our own kitchen), and now I went to get it in case it might be needed. Unfortunately it had been hanging in the lobby, and passing it in my hurry, by the time I had discovered my mistake the burglars had secured it. It would have been of no use to me, however, even if it had been in the bedroom, as the only three cartridges I had brought with me were in my courier-bag, which was hanging on the back of the door of the room into which the burglars burst. As there was no weapon of any kind in the bedroom, not even a stick, we could do nothing except remain