Only men above the third rank are allowed to put on silk. Petty officials must wear cotton. Merchants and farmers may not imitate official robes, but don tighter or more economical coats and trowsers. A common term for officials is “blue clouds,” in reference to their blue-tinted garments. To their assistants, the people apply the nickname, not sarcastic, but honorable, of “crooked backs,” because they always bend low in talking to their employers. The magistrates lay great stress on the trifles of etiquette, and keep up an immense amount of fuss and pomp to sustain their dignity, in order to awe the common folks. Whenever they move abroad, their servants cry out “chii-wa,” “chii-wa,” “get down off your horse,” “get down off your horse,” to riders in sight. The Il-san, or large banner or standard in the form of an umbrella, is borne at the head of the line. To attempt to cross one of their processions is to be seized and punished, and anyone refusing to dismount, or who is slow about slipping off his horse, is at once arrested, to be beaten or mulcted. When permission is given to kill an ox, the head, hide, and feet usually become the perquisites of the magistrate or his minions. The exuberant vocabulary in Corean, for the various taxes, fines, mulcts, and squeezes of the understrappers of the magistrate, in gross and in detail, chief and supplementary, testify to the rigors and expenses of being governed in Chō-sen. Overreaching magistrates, through whose injustice the people are goaded into rebellion, are sometimes punished. It seems that one of the penalties in ancient times was that the culpable official should be boiled in oil. Now, however, the condemned man is exiled, and only rarely put to death, while a commutation of justice—equivalent to being burned in effigy—is made by a pretended boiling in oil. Good and upright magistrates are often remembered by mok-pi, or inscribed columns of wood, erected on the public road by the grateful people. In many instances, this testimonial takes the form of sculptured stone. A number of the public highways are thus adorned. These, with the tol-pi, or monumental bourne, which marks distances or points out the paths to places of resort, are interesting features of travel in the peninsula, and more pleasant to the horseman than the posts near temples and offices on which one may read “Dismount.” At the funeral of great dignitaries of the realm, a life-sized figure of a horse, made of bamboo, dragged before the coffin, is burned along with the clothes of the deceased, and the ashes laid beside his remains.