be pledging each other in a friendly cup. Perhaps they will compose and exchange a pedantic poem or two on the way. In the long, high bow there is room for the two men to walk the deck, while with their poles they propel the craft gently along the stream, while the steersman handles the somewhat unwieldy rudder. The common people use a boat made of plain unpainted wood, neatly joined together, without nails or metal, the fastenings being of wood, the cushions of straw matting and the cordage of sea grass. By official reckoning Chung-chong contains 244,080 houses, with 139,201 men enrolled for military service, in fifty-four districts. It contains ten walled cities, and like every other one of the eight provinces is divided into two departments, Right and Left. CHULLA, OR COMPLETE NETWORK. This province, the most southern of the eight, is also the warmest and most fertile. It is nearest to Shang-hae, and to the track of foreign commerce. Its island-fringed shores have been the scene of many shipwrecks, among which were the French frigates, whose names Glory and Victory, were better than their inglorious end, on a reef near Kokun Island. Until the voyage of Captains Maxwell and Basil Hall, in the Alceste and Lyra, in 1816, “the Corean archipelago” was absolutely unknown in Europe, and was not even marked on Chinese charts. In the map of the empire, prepared by the Jesuits at Peking in the seventeenth century, the main land was made to extend out over a space now known to be covered by hundreds of islands, and a huge elephant—the conventional sign of ignorance of the map-makers of that day—occupied the space. In these virgin waters, Captain Hall sailed over imaginary forests and cities, and straight through the body of the elephant, and for the first time explored an archipelago which he found to be one of the most beautiful on earth. A later visitor, and a naturalist, states that from a single island peak, one may count one hundred and thirty-five islets. Stretching far away to the north and to the south, were groups of dark blue islets, rising mistily from the surface of the water. The sea was covered with large picturesque boats, which, crowded with natives in their white fluttering robes, were putting off from the adjacent villages, and sculling across the pellucid waters to visit the stranger ship.