COEEA. 
505 
any other people. The Chinese valleys are well wooded, the land is 
fertile, and people are able to keep any little that they make ; so I 
can quite understand the inducement that there would be to the 
ordinary Corean farmer to move across the Taloo. 
Next morning wo continued our journey, and at about four miles 
from the Yaloo found the road branching off to Ma-er-shan. We 
kept straight east, and came on a lumber camp on the Yaloo. They 
were a rough-looking lot of fellows, hewing timber. Some of the logs 
were three and four feet in diameter ; they had been floated down 
from some place further north, and were now being prepared for 
shipping inland. 
These lumber rascals wanted $8*00 to put us across the river, and 
when we showed our Chinese passports they laughed and said there 
was no law where they lived, and, consequently, they w r ere not obliged 
to conform to passport conventionalities. Our Corean interpreter, 
who was a very good fellow, took charge and got us across at last for 
the modest sum of 25 cents. 
We found ourselves once more in a mountainous region over- 
looking many bends of the Yaloo, a part of the district of Chasung, 
about 4 j L° 30' N.L. There was a neat path winding over the hills, 
and my boy seasoned the way with bunches of wild onions that grow 
everywhere in the fields in spring. They seemed so fresh and 
acceptable in a land of barrenness. Ten miles more took us to the 
magistrate’s village, Chasung, a miserable slab-roofed settlement where 
they seemed to have nothing in the world to eat but yellow* millet. 
The ferry-boat on the Chasung, a tributary of the Yaloo, had floated 
away, and there was no means of getting across. After waiting in 
vain for a day or two, we made the ponies ford it, and crossed ourselves 
further up, which we reached by climbing the hills. 
All along the way here were traps for tigers. There are un- 
doubtedly many of these animals, and the helpless people live in great 
terror of them. 
Notwithstanding the primitive state of things in general, they 
have schools here as elsewhere in Corea. One little lad whom I met 
was reading Mencius. 
Our baggage here proved a very great inconvenience. There 
were two large pony loads, or about enough for six men, and we 
transported it in all kinds of ways — sometimes on a skid, once by 
cart, of which there are many in the province of Ham Kyung, and 
also by relays of coolies. 
InHooch’ang, a town near the Yaloo, at the furthest point north, 
we found the presence of a disease much like cholera, that had carried 
off many of the younger people the month before. No doubt this is 
partly due to poor living, from -which these northern natives certainly 
suffer. 
On leaving Hooch’ ang (not marked on any map) w r e came almost 
directly south to Changchin on our way to Hamheung, the capital of 
Ham Kyung province. Transportation here utterly failed us, and we 
had to remain for a day or two in a wretched filthy inn, waiting 
hopelessly. Seeing a fishing-rod hanging in an outer room, I took it 
down and went to the river near by to try my hand, but the owner 
came clamouring after me at such a rate about his fishing-rod that I 
was obliged to return it and restore quietness to the neighbourhood. 
