The Koreans travel enormously, considering that they seldom make pilgrimages. The pedlars, who solely supply the markets, are always on the move, and thousands travel for other reasons, such as the gatherings at ancestral tablets, restlessness, _ennui_, _ku-kyöng_ or sightseeing, visits to tombs, place-hunting, literary examinations, place-keeping and attempting to deprive others of place, litigation, and business. The fear of tigers and dæmons prevents people from journeying by night, which is as well, as the bearers of official passports have the right to demand an escort of torchbearers from each village. If necessity compels nocturnal travel, the wayfarers associate themselves in bands, swinging lanterns, waving torches, yelling, and beating gongs. The dread of the tiger is so universal as to warrant the Chinese proverbial saying, “The Korean hunts the tiger one half of the year, and the tiger hunts the Korean the other half.” As I have before remarked, the mandarins and _yang-bans_, with their trains, quarter themselves on the magistracies, and eat the fat of the land. Should they be compelled to have recourse to the discomforts of an inn and the food of a village, they appropriate the best of everything without paying for it. Hence the visit of a foreigner armed with a _kwan-ja_ is such an object of dread, that on this land journey I never let it be known that I had one, and on my second journey discarded it altogether, trusting in both to the reputation for scrupulous honesty which I at once established with my men to overcome the repugnance which the innkeepers felt to receiving me. The roads along which the traveller rides or trudges, at a pace, in either case, of 3 miles an hour, are simply infamous. There are few made roads, and those which exist are deep in dust in summer and in mud in winter, where they are not polished tracks over irregular surfaces and ledges of rock. In most cases they are merely paths worn by the passage of animals and men into some degree of legibility. Many of the streams are unbridged, and most of the bridges, the roadways of which are only of twigs and sod, are carried away by the rains of early July, and are not restored till the middle of October. In some regions traffic has to betake itself to fords or ferries when it reaches a stream, with their necessary risks and detentions. Even on the “Six Great Roads” which centre in the capital, the bridges are apt to be in such a rotten condition that a _mapu_ usually goes over in advance of his horses to ascertain if they will bear their weight. Among the mountains, roads are frequently nothing else than boulder-strewn torrent beds, and on the best, that between Seoul and Chemulpo, during the winter, there are tracts on which the mud is from one to three feet deep. These infamous bridle tracks, of which I have had extensive experience, are one of the great hindrances to the development of Korea.