The Seoul seen from the surrounding mountain-sides, and the Seoul of so-called palaces, is not the city in which the people live. Apart from a few of its inhabitants—such as the missionaries, certain foreign business men and diplomatic agents, together with a small number of native officials who have acquired a taste for foreign ways—the Seoul of the people is disgustingly filthy and abjectly squalid. It is, indeed, not so filthy and miserable, and lacking in all the comforts and decencies of respectable Western life, as it was a generation, or even a few years ago. Several of the streets have now been—not only occasionally when the King was going a “processioning” through them, but habitually and to the benefit of the populace—cleared of their encroachments of squatter hovels, huts, and booths. The gutters along the sides of _these_ streets do not quite so much as formerly disturb the eyes and nostrils of the pedestrian, especially if he walks in the middle of the thoroughfare; their use for vile purposes is not so much in evidence as was the case before any of the natives had even a glimmering sense of decency about such matters. In spite of the increased business activity of the city there is not to-day quite the same stream of white-robed saunterers, stately in gait but low in character, to give a semi-holiday aspect to the “Broadways” of Seoul; for electric cars transport the multitudes back and forth in several directions. Besides, there is the neat, attractive Japanese quarter. Here, according to my observation, the Koreans themselves were doing more sight-seeing and more trading than in their own quarters; for here the cheaper products of the new and hitherto unknown world are skilfully displayed. But otherwise and elsewhere in the city, the same unsanitary conditions and indecent habits, in all respects, prevail. The narrow, winding alleys are flanked with shallow, open ditches, that are not only the drains and sewers but the _latrines_ of the dwellers in the low earth-walled houses on either side. Cowardly and lean dogs, naked children, and rows of men squatting and sucking their long pipes or lying flat upon the ground, crowd and obstruct these alleys. And from them the wide-spreading Korean roofs cut off the purifying and enlivening sunlight. Many of the most wretched and unsanitary of these hovels squat under the shadow of the stately city wall. May its stones sometime be used to build a better and healthier city!