Many fishing villages were passed through in the journey from the Diamond Mountains. Each seemed to reflect the other, the sole difference between them lying in their size, the number of fishing-boats drawn up on the beach, the strength and density of their smells. The poverty and squalor of these hamlets was astonishing. The people seemed without spirit, content to live an idle, slatternly existence in sleeping, yawning, and eating by turns. Despite offers of payment, it was impossible to secure their services in a day’s fishing, although they generally admitted that the boats, nets, and lines were not otherwise engaged. As the outcome of this spirit of indifference among the natives, Japanese fishermen are rapidly securing for themselves the fishing-grounds off the coast. Unless these dreary, meditative, and dirty people arouse themselves soon, the business of fishing in their own waters will have passed altogether from their hands. The Japanese catch fish at all seasons; the Koreans at one only—when it suits them. They have consequently a diminishing influence in a trade so exceedingly profitable that some ten thousand Japanese fishing-boats subsist by it. [Illustration: A FAIR MAGICIAN] The filthy condition of the villages renders any stay in them perilous. It is wiser to camp beyond them in the open. It was my misfortune to stay in several, but in the village of Wha-ding, seventy-five _li_ from Won-san, the virulence and variety of the insects surpassed all my experience in Australia, America, Africa, or Asia. Fleas were everywhere; they floated through the atmosphere, much as the north-west winds of New Zealand and the hot winds of Africa drive particles of fine sand through the air. In this case, however, nothing remained without its thin penetrating covering of fleas. One night in Wha-ding stands out as the most awful of these experiences. It was impossible to stand; it was impossible to sit; sleep was out of the question. We shook our clothes; we bathed and washed and powdered. Every effort was a torture, and each precaution increased the ironies of the situation. To add to the plagues of this accursed place, we were deafened by the ear-splitting incantations of a sorcerer, who had been hired by the proprietor of the village inn to exorcise a devil that had bewitched him. We wondered, afterwards, whether this accounted for the damnable activity among the vermin. After a futile attempt to come to terms with the magician by bribery and corruption through the medium of my interpreter, it was arranged that one of the grooms should represent the evil spirit. He passed out into the desolation of the night and howled plaintively, while we, having collected the elders and the necromancer, solemnly fired our revolvers into the darkness at the departing spirit. Unfortunately, we did not convince the wizard that the devil had been expelled. It was not until, losing my temper and my reason together, I dropped his gongs and