The stagnation of the previous winter was at an end. Japan was in the ascendant. She had a large garrison in the capital, some of the leading men in the Cabinet were her nominees, her officers were drilling the Korean army, changes, if not improvements, were everywhere, and the air was thick with rumors of more to come. The King, whose Royal authority was nominally restored to him, accepted the situation, the Queen was credited with intriguing against the Japanese, but Count Inouye was acting as Japanese minister, and his firmness and tact kept everything smooth on the surface. On the 8th of January, 1895, I witnessed a singular ceremony, which may have far-reaching results in Korean history. The Japanese having presented Korea with the gift of Independence, demanded that the King should formally and publicly renounce the suzerainty of China, and having resolved to cleanse the Augean stable of official corruption, they compelled him to inaugurate the task by proceeding in semi-state to the Altar of the Spirits of the Land, and there proclaiming Korean independence, and swearing before the spirits of his ancestors to the proposed reforms. His Majesty, by exaggerating a trivial ailment, had for some time delayed a step which was very repulsive to him, and even the day before the ceremony, a dream in which an Ancestral Spirit had appeared to him adjuring him not to depart from ancestral ways, terrified him from taking the proposed pledge. But the spirit of Count Inouye proved more masterful than the Ancestral Spirit, and the oath was taken in circumstances of great solemnity in a dark pine wood, under the shadow of Puk Han, at the most sacred altar in Korea, in presence of the Court and the dignitaries of the kingdom. Old and serious men had fasted and mourned for two previous days, and in the vast crowd of white-robed and black-hatted men which looked down upon the striking scene from a hill in the grounds of the Mulberry Palace, there was not a smile or a spoken word. The sky was dark and grim, and a bitter east wind was blowing--ominous signs in Korean estimation. The Royal procession, which had something of the aspect of the _kur-dong_, was shorn of the barbaric splendor which made that ceremonial one of the most imposing in the Eastern world. It was, in fact, barbaric with the splendor left out; and there were suggestions of a new era and a forthcoming swamping wave of Western civilization, in the presence within the Palace gates and in the procession of a few trim, dapper, blue-ulstered Japanese policemen, as the special protectors of the Home Minister Pak-Yöng-Ho, one of the revolutionaries of 1884, against whom there was a vow of vengeance, though the King had been compelled to pardon him, to reinstate his ancestors who had been degraded, to recall him from exile, and to confer upon him high office.