The “four classes of society” include the literary men or officials, the farmers, the artisans, and the traders. Among the nobility are various ranks, indicated by titles, high offices at court, or nearness of relationship to the king. He is “neither ox nor horse” is the native slang for one who is neither noble nor commoner. The nobles are usually the serf-proprietors or slave-holders, many of them having in their households large numbers whom they have inherited along with their ancestral chattels. The master has a right to sell or otherwise dispose of the children of his slaves if he so choose. The male slave is called chong-nom. A free man may marry a female slave, in which case he is termed a pi-pu. The male children by this marriage are free, but the female offspring belong to the master of the mother, and may be sold. A liberated slave is called pal-sin, and he speaks of his former master as ku-siang. The native vocabulary for the slave in his various relations is sufficiently copious. “Fugitive” slaves, “slave-hunters,” and “slave-drivers,” are as common to the Corean ear, as to the American in the long-ago days of “before the war.” A pan-no is a bondsman trying to escape, and to attempt chiu-ro is to hunt the fugitive and bring him back. The in-chang is the public slave of the village. Yet such a thing as the bondsman’s servile love of place, rising into swollen and oppressive pride that looks down on the poor freeman, is a common thing, and cruel and overbearing treatment of the peasantry by the minions of a noble is too frequently witnessed in Corea. “Tek-pun-ai” (“By your favor,” equivalent to “Let me live, I pray you”) is a cry, more than once heard by French missionaries, from a man beaten by the swaggering serfs of some nobleman. It is not exactly the feeling of the sleek and well-bred black slave of old-time Virginia for “the poor white trash,” since in Corea slavery has no color-line; yet, in essentials of circumstance, it is the same. Such a phase of character is more likely to be developed among the serfs of the old barons or landed proprietors who have longest occupied their hereditary possessions, and who keep up a petty court within their castles or semi-fortified mansions.