From the high-road from Seoul to Wön-san we diverged at Nam-San to visit the large monastery of Sök-wang Sa, famous as being the place where, in the palmy days of Korean Buddhism, Atai-jo, the first king of the present dynasty, was educated and lived. The monastery itself, with its temples, was erected by this king to mark the spot where, 504 years ago, he received that supernatural message to rule in virtue of which his descendant occupies the Korean throne to-day. In this singularly beautiful spot Atai-jo’s early years were spent in religious exercises, study, and preparation, and many of the superb trees which adorn the grand mountain clefts in which Sök-wang Sa is situated are said to have been planted by his hands. His regalia and robes of state are preserved in a building by themselves, which no one is allowed to enter except the duly appointed attendant. A bridle track alongside of a clear mountain stream leads through very pretty and prosperous-looking country, and over wooded foothills for some miles to the base of a fine mountain range. We passed for a length of time through rich and heavily-timbered monastic property, then the beautiful valley narrowed, and by a “Red Arrow Gate” we entered on a smooth broad road, on which the sun glinted here and there through the heavy foliage of an avenue of noble pines, a gap now and then giving entrancing glimpses of the deep delicious blue of the summer sky, of a grand gorge dark with pines, firs, and the exotic _Cleyera Japonica_ and zelkawa, brightened by the tender green of maples and other deciduous trees, and by flashes of foam from a torrent booming among great moss-covered boulders. Then came bridges with decorative roofs, abbots’ tombstones under carved and painted canopies, inscribed stone tablets, glorious views of a peaked, forest-clothed mountain barring the gorge, and as the pines of the avenue fell into groups at its close, and magnificent zelkawas, from whose spreading branches white roses hung in graceful festoons, overarched the road, a long irregular line of temples and monastic buildings appeared, clinging in singular picturesqueness to the sides of the ravine, which there ascends somewhat rapidly towards the mountain, which closes it. An abbot, framed in the doorway of a quaint building, and looking like a picture of a portly, jolly, mediæval friar, welcomed us, and he and his monks regaled us with honey water in the large guest hall, but simultaneously produced a visitors’ book and asked us how much we were going to pay, the sum being duly recorded. The grasping ways of these monks, who fleeced the _mapu_ so badly as to make them say they “had fallen among thieves,” contrast with the friendly hospitality of their brethren of the Diamond Mountain, and can only be accounted for by the contaminating influences of a treaty port, from which they are distant only a long day’s journey!