I was informed of this state of affairs by my colporteur, whom I had sent down to visit those remote churches. I immediately reported it to the committee in Antanànarìvo. Printed certificates were prepared, which one of the missionaries in the capital, or I, was empowered to fill up, sign, and give to bona fide local preachers. I dispatched my colporteur again to Mojangà, with instructions to show a copy of the certificate to each church, and inform them that no one who failed to bring one of those documents duly signed was to be allowed to preach; nor was any one to be allowed to join them in the Communion Service, unless he brought a certificate of membership from the church to which he belonged. While my colporteur was at Mojangà, the late Sir Bartle Frere visited the port. He landed on the Sabbath morning, worshipped, and joined in the Communion Service with the small native church there. The following May, being in London, he attended the annual meeting of the London Missionary Society in Exeter Hall, took a seat on the platform, and in the course of the meeting asked the chairman’s permission to make a few remarks. In a graceful speech he testified to what he himself had seen of the fruits of the society’s work on the north-west coast of Madagascar[29]. CHAPTER V BREAKING UP THE FALLOW GROUND ‘A light for revelation to the Gentiles.’--ST. LUKE ii. 32. From the first I had to give a good deal of medical advice to my people, and my work in that direction increased so rapidly that, finally, I had to confine medical work to one day a week, unless the case was very urgent. It is important that the majority of missionaries should know something about medicine--if only enough to impress them with its mysteries and their ignorance of its action, so as to keep them from prescribing unless they are pretty sure of their diagnosis. Medical skill is often of great service in the work and to the workers themselves. Besides, no native will believe that a European knows nothing of medicine. There is, however, a danger of a man being tempted (and many yield to the temptation) to give more time than he can afford to that part of his work, to the detriment of other and even more important duties. Dentistry was very popular, for the Malagasy suffer much from toothache. One of their proverbs says: ‘A worm in the tooth, there is no cure except extraction.’ The Malagasy may almost be said to know nothing of nerves in our sense of the term; but I have seen a Malagasy young woman writhing on the ground under the agony of toothache, from which she only found relief on my extracting the tooth. One morning I drew three teeth, one after the other, for one woman, who never once winced, but, with her mouth half full of blood, simply said, ‘Thank you, sir!’ and walked away as if nothing had happened.