The children of Madagascar / by Herbert F. Standing.

  • Herbert Standing
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The children of Madagascar / by Herbert F. Standing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    3° on until the seventh, and it too jumped right over the little one without harming it in the least. How the poor mother's heart must have'beat with hope and fear as she saw one after another of the huge beasts come up and thus take compassion on her little child ! It is said that the present Prime Minister of Madagascar was put out in this way to be trodden by the cattle, but he likewise escaped, and has lived to rise to great power and has been the husband of three Queens of Madagascar. But do you think it was because the Malagasy mothers did not love their babies that they treated them so cruelly ? No indeed, for mother-love is the same all the world over, and these poor women loved their children as dearly perhaps as your mothers love you ; but they feared to break through the cruel custom, and they were afraid too lest what the wise diviner said should come true. There were, indeed, those who could not find it in their hearts to kill their children in this way, and these used to take them out on some well-frequented road and leave them there by the wayside. Often some kind-hearted person coming by, perhaps a woman who had no children of her own, would have pity on the little outcast and take it home and bring it up as her own. If, however, no one happened to pass that way, or if no one was willing to adopt the child, it was simply left to die of cold and hunger, and its little body was eaten by the crows and wild dogs. Others, again, used to hide their children away, and as they grew up send them off to live in some other house away from their parents and friends, thus averting, as they thought, the evil influence that the child would have had upon them. Sometimes, again, the father and the mother of a child born on this unlucky day, or his owner, if he happened to be a little slave, would employ a man to make an incantation which was supposed to be effectual in changing its evil destiny. This man would get a banana, and having cut it up into small pieces, would fling it away from him, repeating a form of words something like the following, 'Begone, ill-