The Portuguese, trading at Nagasaki, made cotton wool a familiar object to the Japanese soldiers. While the army was in Corea a European ship, driven far out of her course and much damaged by the storm, anchored off Yokohama. Being kindly treated while refitting, the captain, among other gifts to the daimiō of the province, gave him a bag of cotton seeds, which were distributed. The yarn selling at a high price, the culture of the shrub spread rapidly through the provinces of Eastern and Northern Japan, being already common in the south provinces. Even if the culture of cotton was not introduced into Corea by the Japanese army, it is certain that it has been largely exported from Japan during the last two centuries. The increase of general comfort by this one article of wear and use can hardly be estimated. Not only as wool and fibre, but in the oil from its seeds, the nation added largely to the sum of its blessings. Paper, from silk and hemp, rice stalk fibres, mulberry bark, and other such raw material, had long been made by the Chinese, but it is probable that the Coreans, first of the nations of Chinese Asia, made paper from cotton wool. For this manufacture they to-day are famed. Their paper is highly prized in Peking and Japan for its extreme thickness and toughness. It forms part of the annual tribute which the embassies carry to Peking. It is often thick enough to be split into several layers, and is much used by the tailors of the Chinese metropolis as a lining for the coats of mandarins and gentlemen. It also serves for the covering of window-frames, and a sewed wad of from ten to fifteen thicknesses of it make a kind of armor which the troops wear. It will resist a musket-ball, but not a rifle-bullet. CHAPTER XXI. THE ISSACHAR OF EASTERN ASIA. The Shan-yan Alin, or Ever-White Mountains, stand like a wall along the northern boundary of the Corean peninsula. Irregular mountain masses and outjutting ranges of hills form its buttresses, while, at intervals, lofty peaks rise as towers. These are all overtopped by the central spire Paik-tu, or Whitehead, which may be over ten thousand feet high. From its bases flow out the Yalu, Tumen, and Hurka Rivers. From primeval times the dwellers at the foot of this mountain, who saw its ever hoary head lost in the clouds, or glistening with fresh-fallen snow, conceived of a spirit dwelling on its heights in the form of a virgin in white. Her servants were animals in white fur and birds in white plumage.