The wardrobe of the gentry consists of the ceremonial and the house dress. The former, as a rule, is of fine silk, and the latter of coarser silk or cotton. These “gorgeous Corean dresses” are of pink, blue, and other rich colors. The official robe is a long garment like a wrapper, with loose, baggy sleeves. This is embroidered with the stork or phœnix for civil, and with the kirin, lion, or tiger for military officers. Buttons are unknown and form no part of a Corean’s attire, male or female, thus greatly reducing the labor of the wives and mothers who ply the needle, which in Corea has an “ear” instead of an “eye.” Strings and girdles, and the shifting of the main weight of the clothing to the shoulders, take the place of these convenient, but fugitive, adjuncts to the Western costume. There are few tailors’ shops, the women of each household making the family outfit. Soldiers in full dress wear a sleeveless, open surcoat for display. The under dress of both sexes is a short jacket with tight sleeves, which for men reaches to the thighs, and for women only to the waist, and a pair of drawers reaching from waist to ankle, a little loose all the way down for the men, and tied at the ankles, but for the women made tight and not tied. The females wear a petticoat over this garment, so that the Coreans say they dress like Western women, and foreign-made hosiery and under-garments are in demand. Although they have a variety of articles of apparel easily distinguishable to the native eye, yet their general style of costume is that of the wrapper, stiff, wide, and inflated with abundant starch in summer, but clinging and baggy in winter. The rule is tightness and economy for the working, amplitude and richness of material for the affluent classes. The women having no pockets in their dresses, wear a little bag suspended from their girdle. This is worn on the right side, attached by cords. These contain their bits of jewelry, scissors, knife, a tiger’s claw for luck, perfume-bottle or sachet, a tiny chess-board in gold or silver, etc. Besides the rings on their fingers the ladies wear hair-pins of gold ornamented with bulbs or figures of birds. Many of them dust pun, or white powder, on their faces, and employ various other cosmetics, which are kept in their kiong-tai, or mirror toilet-stands; in which also may be their so-hak, or book containing rules of politeness. The general type of costume is that of China under the Ming dynasty. To a Chinaman a Corean looks antiquated, a curiosity in old clothes; a Japanese at a little distance, in the twilight, is reminded of ghosts, or the snowy heron of the rice-fields, while to the American the Corean swell seems compounded chiefly of bed-clothes, and in his most elaborate costume to be still in his under-garments.