The chorus of _A-ra-rüng_ is invariable, but the verses which are sung in connection with it take a wide range through the fields of lyrics, epics, and didactics. There is a third style, which is between the classical and the popular, but which hardly deserves mention. To my thinking, the melancholy which seems the _motif_ of most Oriental music becomes an extreme plaintiveness in that of Korea, partly due probably to the unlimited quavering on one note. While what may be called concerted music is torture to a Western ear, solos on the flute ofttimes combine a singular sweetness with their mournfulness and suggest “Far-off Melodies.” Love songs are popular, and there is a tender grace about some of them, as well as an occasional glint of humor, as indicated by the last line of the third stanza of one translated by Mr. Gale.[23] The allusions to Nature generally show a quick and sympathetic insight into her beauties, and occasional stanzas, of which the one cited is among several translated by Mr. Hulbert, have a delicacy of touch not unworthy of an Elizabethan poet.[24] The _Korean Repository_ is doing a good work in making Korean poetry accessible to English readers. There was not, however, any flute music at Ta-ri-mak. There were classical songs, with a direful drum accompaniment, and a wearisome repetition of the _A-ra-rüng_, continuing all day and late into the hot night. A few pedlars passed by, selling tobacco, necessaries, and children’s toys, the latter rudely made, and only attractive in a country in which artistic feeling appears dead. There are shops in Seoul, Phyöng-yang, and other cities devoted to the sale of such toys, painted in staring colors, and illustrative chiefly of adult life. There are also monkeys, puppies, and tigers on wheels, all for boys, and soldiers in European uniforms have appeared during the recent military craze, and boys are very early taught to look forward to official life by representations of mandarins’ chairs, red-tasselled umbrellas, and fringed hats. Girls being of comparatively small account, toys specially suited to them are not many. Japanese lucifer matches, which, when of the cheap sort, seem only slightly inflammable, as I have several times used a whole box without igniting one, were in the stock of the pedlars, and are making rapid headway in the towns, but even so near Wön-san as Ta-ri-mak is, the people were still using flint and steel to light chips of wood dipped in sulphur, though the cheap and smoky kerosene lamp has displaced the tall, upright candlestick and the old-fashioned dish lamps there and in very many other country places.