Where the road is broad, a high heap of hardened mud runs along the centre, with hardened mud corrugations on either side; where narrow, it is merely the top of a rice dyke. The bridges are specially infamous; in fact, they were so rotten that the _mapu_ would not trust their ponies upon them, and we forded all the streams. Yet this road, which I found equally bad at the three points at which I touched it, is one of the leading thoroughfares by which goods pass from the east to the west coast and _vice versa_,--tobacco, copper, salt fish, seaweed, galena, and hides from the east, and foreign shirtings, watches, and miscellaneous native and foreign articles from the west. The heat of the sun was but poorly indicated by a shade temperature of 84°, and it was in his full noontide fierceness that we reached the huddle of foul and narrow alleys and irregular rows of thatched shops along the high-road which make up the busy and growing Korean town of Wön-san, which, with an estimated population of 15,000 people, lies along a strip of beach below a pine-clothed bluff and ranges of mountains, then green to their summits, but which I saw in December of the same year in the majesty of the snow which covers them from November to May. The smells were fearful, the dirt abominable, and the quantity of wretched dogs and of pieces of bleeding meat blackening in the sun perfectly sickening. This aspect of meat, produced by the mode of killing it, has made foreigners entirely dependent on the Japanese butchers in Seoul and elsewhere. The Koreans cut the throat of the animal and insert a peg in the opening. Then the butcher takes a hatchet and beats the animal on the rump until it dies. The process takes about an hour, and the beast suffers agonies of terror and pain before it loses consciousness. Very little blood is lost during the operation; the beef is full of it, and its heavier weight in consequence is to the advantage of the vendor. Then came a level stretch of about a mile, much planted with potatoes, glimpses of American Protestant mission-houses in conspicuous and eligible positions (eligible, that is, for everything but mission work), and the uneven Korean road glided imperceptibly into a broad gravel road, fringed on both sides with neat wooden houses standing in gardens, which gradually thickened into the neatest, trimmest, and most attractive town in all Korea, the Japanese settlement of the treaty port of Wön-san, opened to Japanese trade in 1880 and to foreign trade generally in 1883.