The mats which are placed over the oiled paper, or more likely directly on the earth floor, are full of dust and vermin of all descriptions, which run riot everywhere. It is best not to begin to think how many people have, in that room and lying on these identical mats, been ill, and died, of dysentery, small-pox, cholera or typhus fever, since the room was even swept or the mats once shaken. A “really truly” cleaning they are ignorant of. Fumigation and disinfection are as far beyond the flights of their wildest imagination as the private life of the man in the moon. The miracle over which we never cease to wonder and admire is that so many people of clean antecedents who travel through the interior are able to resist the microbes, bacteria, germs and all similar enemies under whatsoever name which, according to all modern science, ought to attack and destroy them in short order. In most of the inns, tall earthen jars, from two to three, or rarely four feet high, and two or three feet in diameter, in which Ali Baba’s cutthroat thieves could easily hide, are ranged along the side of the wall, but more frequently in the courtyard. They contain various kinds of grain, pickles, beer, wine, and there are always several holding _kimchi_ (a sort of sauerkraut), without which they never eat rice. Numbers of dogs, cats, chickens, pigs and ducks are under foot in the courtyard, oxen and ponies are noisily feeding in the stalls, under the same roof with ourselves, only just outside the paper door, and if one is to sleep it must be in spite of a combined grunting, squealing, cackling, blowing and barking, anything but conducive to repose. Most of the hotels have, as has been said, only one inner room, where it is proper for a woman to stay. Our helper, chair-coolies, mapoos and other travelers use the sarang, packed very likely like sardines in a box, and the host’s family turn out, and go to a neighbor’s for the night, unless the inn is a large one on the main road. A large and fashionable inn in Korea would have perhaps five, or even six, sleeping apartments--though I do not recollect having seen so many.