A VISIT TO KOREA 291 



clothes at some more or less clean stream, a labour which must 

 truly be without end, especially during the long winter months, 

 when all clothes have first to be unpicked, the wadding taken 

 out, then washed and again put together and re-wadded. The 

 Koreans live on rice, millet, beans, a kind of pickled very 

 odoriferous cabbage, fish and any meat they can pick up. 

 Unlike the Japanese and Chinese, they drink no tea, only rice 

 or perhaps honey-water. In the country, in the villages and 

 smaller towns, the people are all dressed alike, in white with 

 black hat, and the ghostlike stately crowd has a curious effect ; 

 except the labouring class, the men apparently have nothing to 

 do but gossip and to smoke their pipes. Mourners, and people 

 mourn their nearest relation father for four years, are dressed 

 in sackcloth and wear a huge wicker-work hat, 4 feet in 

 diameter, scalloped at the edges and covering the face entirely. 

 Boys have a coloured jacket, generally pink, and a long pigtail, 

 which is made into a top-knot on their marriage generally at 

 14 or 15. After the ceremony the young bridegroom goes about 

 in a yellow straw hat with very small crown for a period of three 

 months. 



After a sixteen hours' run round the extremely rocky and 

 dangerous coast of Southern Korea, the ship reached Chemulpo, 

 with its European settlement, Chinese, Japanese, and native 

 towns, its bare hills, bustling wharf and hard-working, powerful 

 coolies ; this is the port to the capital Seoul a railway con- 

 necting the two. At an interview with a resident, prospects of 

 sport brightened up again ; the country was full of geese, ducks, 

 &c., and obstacles were made light of. I had brought, so they 

 told me, too few cartridges, and in my enthusiasm immediately 

 bought several hundred more ; a small house-boat could be hired 

 and everything would run smoothly. However, obstacles did 

 present themselves ; the Japanese owner seemed anything but 

 anxious to let me the boat, asked a high price ; sampans had to 

 be hired to tow it up the river; the necessary Korean hunter 

 declined to go under five yen (ten shillings) a day, thirty-five to 

 be guaranteed in case I stayed away less than a week a most 

 outrageous attempt at extortion. He told us that it was easy 

 now during the goose season to make five yen a day by shooting 

 five geese, which, like everything else, proved untrue, for geese 

 hardly fetched a half-yen in the market. A cook could not be 



