The situation in which Seoul lies is enchanting. High hills and mountains rise close to the city, their sides rough, rugged and bleak, save where black patches of bushes and trees struggle for existence. The hollows within this rampart of hills and beyond the walls, are fresh and verdant. Small rice-fields, with clusters of thatched hovels in their midst, stretch between the capital and the port at Chemulpo. The atmosphere is clear; the air is sweet; the city is neat and orderly. It is possible, moreover, to live with great comfort in the three-storied brick structure, which, from a pretty collection of Korean buildings, nestling beneath the city wall, has been converted into the Station Hotel. There is but one wall round Seoul. It is neither so high nor so massive as the wall of Pekin; yet the situation of the city gains so much in beauty from the enclosing mountains, that it seems to be much the more picturesque. If the capital of Korea is more charmingly situated than the capital of China, the wall of Seoul is reminiscent of the walls of the Nankow Pass in the superb disdain with which it clings to the edges of the mountains, climbing the most outlandish places in the course of its almost purposeless meanderings. It extends beyond the lofty crests of Peuk-an and across the splendid and isolated peak of Nam-san, enclosing a forest in one direction, a vacant and soulless plain in another, dropping here into a ravine, to emerge again a few hundred feet higher on the mountain slopes. The wall is in good preservation. In places it is a rampart of mud faced with masonry; more generally it is a solid structure of stone, fourteen miles in circumference, twenty-rive to forty feet in height, battlemented along its entire length and pierced by eight arches of stone. The arches serve as gateways; they are crowned with high tiled towers, the gables of which curve in the fashion of China.