Thursday proved a busy and pleasant day. We paid numerous visits to the various quarters of the town; examined the market; held consultations with the pastor of the church; and examined the scholars he had gathered in the school. Thus we learned a great deal respecting the district, the town we were visiting, and the progress of the Christian congregations which it contains. We found an excellent observing station and took a few photographs. AMBATONDRAZAKA is a good town of four hundred houses, and a population of two thousand souls. It is built on the side of a peninsula or ridge running up from the great ridges on the south-east: and it overlooks a fine bay in these hills from which a great rice-harvest had only recently been carried away. A broad road coming down the crest of the ridge divides the town into nearly equal parts. In the centre of the town and east of the road stands the rova or fortress occupied by the Hova governor and his garrison. This rova is laid out with great regularity: its large well-built houses are all in line; the streets are broad and clean; and each house forms a block with a road on every side. The whole is surrounded by a double stockade; and between the two fences is a space of thirty feet. The governor’s house, or lápá, is in the north-east division of the town, and has a stockade of its own: it is a house of two stories, with verandahs round it, and looks large and comfortable, even among the substantial buildings by which it is surrounded. In old Malagasy fashion, all these houses are built of wood. Outside the rova are a large number of houses, built of clay, wood or reeds, with large enclosures of clay or reed for the great cattle-herds with which the district abounds. The people in these houses looked squalid and poor: pigs were abundant, and the streets were dirty. The Chapel, however, on the west of the road, and opposite the rova, is a handsome building, a copy of its mother church at Analakely in the Capital. It is built of clay; is ninety feet long by thirty-six broad; and has doors, windows and pulpit all well made. The walls are white-washed; and the floor was covered from end to end with fine mats, carefully sewn together. We heard with much pleasure that, before the outbreak of small-pox, this fine building was usually filled at the Sunday morning service. In a town like this our bearers soon found friends; as retailers of the latest news from the Capital, with which the soldiers of the garrison are connected by a thousand ties, they were everywhere welcome, and without difficulty made themselves at home.