Fourteen miles north-west of Ambohidratrimo is Vangaina, which became the residence of a missionary in 1903. It is the centre of fifty outstations, which are superintended by the Vangaina missionary, the Rev. Thomas Tester. The beautifully situated Mission house has been built on the hillside some distance off the main motor-car road from Tananarive to the Port of Majunga on the north-west coast. At the station there is a Church and a school. A united meeting for the Churches of the district was held at the outstation, Ampanotokana, at which forty-four Churches were represented, crowding the building to its utmost capacity. Our journeys to these country stations afforded many opportunities of seeing various sides of native life. On the way to Vangaina we visited the large native market at Mahitsy on market day. We went up and down between the stalls in the market place. The vendors must have numbered many hundreds, and the people attending the market some thousands from all over the countryside. Amongst the articles for sale were straw hats and mats, spades and hatchets, great heaps of fine pineapples, sugar cane, pigs, cattle, rice, meat, great piles of a small kind of dried fish, salt, tinware, calico, black soap (like the soap our missionary, Mr. Cameron, taught the natives to make eighty years ago), buttons, biscuits, ducks, vegetables--all in the greatest profusion. Perhaps the most interesting feature was the space set apart for the blacksmiths, who were repairing spades, tinware, cart-wheels, etc., with the help of primitive forges. The blast was created by two upright cylinders of wood with pipes from the bottom of them to convey the wind to the charcoal fire. The air was driven into these pipes by means of plates of wood, which were forced up and down the cylinders by poles attached to the upper surface and worked by men’s hands. They formed very effective bellows. Vangaina itself is a small village with two moats, each about twenty feet deep, in which banana trees were growing. An interesting feature in the village is a great tree in which I saw three enormous nests of the crested-umber built in the forks of the tree and made of hay, straw, grass, and twigs, each one being about six feet long by six feet wide. The bird is about the size of the domestic fowl with longer wings, and is called the Taketra. It is a bird of ill-omen, and in the old days when the ex-Queen used to come out to Ambohimanga she would turn back again to Tananarive if one of these birds crossed her path. The old Malagasy believe that these birds bring leprosy.