It was about this time at one of the midnight prayer-meetings, held in the house of Rafàravàvy Maria in the capital, that Razàka and his wife were baptized and received into the church. He had been a pupil of the missionaries, had been expelled from his father’s house for his adherence to the New Religion, and had his first wife (the wife his father and friends had provided for him) taken from him by her parents. They refused to allow their daughter to live with an outcast! He wrote his story for me, on condition that I should not publish it during his lifetime. After his death, in 1884, it appeared in the Malagasy _Good Words_, and was afterwards issued in the form of a booklet, many copies of which have been given as school prizes. He told me that during the persecutions many of the Christians fled from the capital to Vònizòngo, and there remained in hiding for many a day. After the martyrdom of Ràmitràha, Razàka secured the Bible which belonged to the small Christian community at Fihàonana, and with it carried on the midnight prayer-meetings, which Ràmitràha had begun. He once said to me: ‘You know, sir, that often at those midnight prayer-meetings, when we read the Bible, we came upon parts we did not understand. We had no missionary to explain them.’ ‘What then did you do?’ I asked. ‘We read and re-read them,’ he replied, ‘prayed and re-prayed over them until we thought we understood them.’ They used often, he said, to long for the rainy season, for a thunderstorm with its torrential rains, that they might be free to refresh their hearts with a hymn. In the central provinces of Madagascar some five months of the year pass without rain; but when the rains do come they descend in a deluge. Terrific thunderstorms usher in these tropical rains. In an hour and a half I have known three inches of rain to fall. In the lap of such storms the persecuted found freedom to worship God. The Malagasy are fond of singing, and sing well. Their language lends itself to musical expression. It has been called the ‘Italian of the Southern Hemisphere.’ It is soft, liquid, flexible, and rich in vowels. ‘In 1853 the Rev. William Ellis, sent out by the London Missionary Society, and Mr. James Cameron from the Cape visited the port of Tàmatàve, but they were not allowed to journey to the capital. In June, 1854, Mr. Ellis again went to Tàmatàve, and during a stay there of some weeks saw many Christian refugees; and was enabled to do something to sustain the courage and the hope of the persecuted natives.