It was while living in the village of Fìhàonana that my wife had her first severe attack of malarial fever, while our child had croup badly, followed by a severe attack of bronchitis, brought on by the bitterly cold night winds, from which our hut afforded us insufficient protection. In this connexion I am reminded of a splendid feat of one of our Malagasy men, who had been a servant of ours, but had fallen into disgrace and been discharged. When he heard that I wanted a man to go to the capital for medicine for my child, he volunteered to go, and ran to the capital and back, a distance of eighty miles, in fourteen hours! We took him back into our service, my wife trained him to be a good cook and a first-class baker, and he only left our service in 1898 to take up a temperance restaurant at Fìhàonana. On July 12, 1871, we left Antanànarìvo for Vònizòngo, and arrived that evening at Fìhàonana, where we settled down to work. We lived and laboured there until driven away in July, 1879, after many months of severe suffering from fever. The first and last years of our first term of service were trying indeed. In our first year my own protracted sickness, followed by my wife’s dangerous illness, made it a specially trying time for us. Throughout our last year we had not a single month in which one or other of us was not prostrated by fever. We had two very bad fever seasons in succession in Vònizòngo, and lost some five thousand of our people. The interval between our first and last years was simply glorious. Full of our work, we flung ourselves heart and soul into it. We loved our work and our people, and were loved by them in return. As their first missionaries we were their first _Rai-àman-drèny_, ‘father and mother.’ They had several teachers after us, but none that they ever recognized in the same way as their _Rai-àman-drèny_. Then our children were about us, and we were as happy and contented as could be. But after the first term of service it is always a very different story, for it is then but an impoverished, lopsided life that the missionary and his wife must live. He is a very fortunate man who is able to spend two years out of the next twenty with his family. Therein lies the sacrifice and suffering of missionary family life; and the children feel it most, for they miss their parents greatly, just at the very time when their help and advice would be of highest service. Good, kind, warm-hearted friends do much for the missionaries’ children, and make such compensation for their parents’ absence as is possible. Ninety per cent. of all missionary families have to suffer in this way (otherwise I should feel ashamed to mention the matter); and yet I question if ten per cent. of the members of the home churches, whose messengers, in a very real sense, the missionaries are, ever give a single thought to this side of missionary life.