In addition to the editorship of a weekly religious newspaper, Bible translation, preparation of tracts and hymns, city training classes, weekly religious services and meetings, supervision of schools and language class for missionaries, Mr. Underwood felt that a special effort ought to be made for the nobility and gentry, the hardest people in the country to reach with the gospel. This is the case, partly because officials who would retain office must go at regular intervals and offer certain prayers and sacrifices at royal shrines, partly that the ideas of caste are so strong that the nobility are unwilling to seat themselves on the floor in our churches among farmers, peddlers, coolies, merchants or even scholars, to listen to the gospel; and in addition, that their family life is grounded and interwoven on and in the concubine system. All of them have two or more families, some of them many. These numerous wives, their parents and progeny would make life intolerable should the husband put them aside. His friends and relatives would look upon him as too evil to live should he neglect to worship the ancestral tablets, and the spirits of his ancestors themselves would follow him like harpies, with all sorts of misfortunes and diseases. Each man, too, looks forward with great complacency to being honored in his time as he has honored his dead parents, and seems to be overwhelmed with something like terror at the idea of having no one to worship his memory and offer sacrifices before his tablets, so that childless men usually adopt sons to keep their memory green. The ladies of this class, the first wives, are, as I think I have said before, very closely secluded, and are never seen except in their own apartments or the anpang of their kin, whither they are carried in closely covered chairs. In such a state of affairs it is not strange that men should hesitate to listen to the doctrines of a religion which would turn their whole social world upside down, wreck their homes, cast upon them the blackest stigma, turn them outside the pale of court and official life, rob them of their income, and rank them with the common people. Knowing that it was almost impossible to induce them to attend church, an invitation was therefore issued, asking a large number of them to come to our house to talk over religious matters. To our surprise the call was most heartily responded to, and two large rooms were crowded with high Korean gentlemen, all of whom came no doubt from politeness or curiosity.