Everything except force had been resorted to by missionaries and foreigners residing in Seoul to prevent my taking this journey. No European woman had, as yet, ever traveled in the interior of Korea, and not more than four or five men had ever ventured ten miles outside the walls, except to the port. Tigers and leopards were known to exist in the mountains; the character of the natives was not well understood by most people; contagion in the inns, the rudeness of mobs, the difficulty of obtaining good water, no means of speedy communication with Seoul, the necessity at times of long marches, were all possible dangers, but were greatly overestimated. It was freely and frequently predicted, that if I came back at all, it would be in my coffin, and my poor husband fell under the heaviest of public censure for consenting to take me. As he had made two trips and saw no difficulty, I felt I could trust his judgment, and as country work was exactly what I had longed to do, and what had been my ideal from the first, I looked forward with the greatest pleasure to a journey through a lovely country, to be filled with blessed service; it seemed to me no honeymoon so rich in delight could ever have been planned before. It was arranged that I should go in a native chair, which consisted of a sort of box frame, high enough for me to sit in Turkish fashion; it had a roof of bamboo covered with paper oiled and painted, the sides were closed in with blue muslin, and there were little windows of stained glass on either side. A curtain in the front could be raised or buttoned down to keep out the chill or the disagreeable piercing eyes of the curious sightseers or _kugungers_, as they are called in Korea. My conveyance was made more comfortable by cushions beneath and behind my seat, a shawl was draped around the inside to keep out draughts, and with a hot-water bottle and foot-muff at my feet, I felt positively steeped in luxury, and quite too much babyfied for a hardy missionary. I was carried by a couple of strong chair coolies, the poles on which the chair was placed resting in straps, which hung from the shoulders of the carriers, so that its main weight came on them, rather than on the hands, which grasped the poles. There were four bearers, two who carried, and two who, by placing a strong rod under the chair, lifted its weight from the tired shoulders, for half a minute or so, once every ten minutes. At the end of every three miles these lifting men and the others changed places, and so we easily made thirty miles or more every day, without much fatigue on the part of these hardy men, whose profession this had been for years.