Around the hovels, in all these clusters of small villages by the waves, men slept in the blazing sunshine. While their lords reposed, the women mended the rents in the nets, or busied themselves in constructing crude traps, with the aid of which their husbands contrived to catch fish. The aspect of these villages upon the beach was not inviting; and they did not compare favourably with any of the inland villages through which we had passed. They were dirty, tumble-down, and untidy; the appearance of the people suggested great personal uncleanliness. The air was laden with the smell of fish drying in the sun—of itself a pleasant perfume, smacking of the salt of the sea—but here so mingled with the odours of decaying offal, piles of rubbish, and varieties of fish and seaweed in different stages of decomposition that the condensed effluvium was sickening. The people, however, were neither curious nor unkindly; for the great part they were indifferent, offering baskets of fresh eggs, fish, and chickens readily for sale. The beach by these villages was black with rows of fish, drying, upon the white sand, in the most primitive fashion. The art of smoking fish is unknown, and the careless manner in which the curing is done proves that the treatment has neither principle nor system. Dogs lay upon these rows of fish, fowls feed undisturbed off them, and, in many places, men slept peacefully with a number of them heaped together, to serve as pillows for their weary heads. Where such neglect prevails, it is perhaps not unnatural that much of the disease among the Koreans should be attributed to the dried fish which they eat so greedily. The trade in salted and sun-dried fish is extensive and finds its way all over the kingdom; an overland traffic of considerable importance exists with the capital. Strings or stacks of dried fish are to be seen in every village. Pack ponies, and coolies laden with loads of dried fish, are met upon every road in the kingdom. The pedestrian who “humps his own swag” almost always carries a small stock with him. The parallel industry to the business of curing fish is the operation of making salt from sea-water, a pursuit which is conducted in a manner equally rough and casual. In both of these industries there is a crying need for simple technical instruction, as well as for capital, the lack of which hinders the work from achieving any particular success. There is so much fish in the sea along the coast, that, if the catches were properly treated, the beginning of a prosperous export trade could be readily laid. At the present only a bare sufficiency is secured, the days of prosperity not yet having begun to dawn. The industry is completely paralysed by the exactions of the officials; the fishermen, like the peasants, knowing only too well that an immunity from the demands of the _Yamen_ is found only in a condition of extreme poverty.