There are two Chinese bridges on that road, curved slabs of stone, supported on four-sided blocks of granite, giving one a feeling of security, even though they have no parapets. Korean bridges are poles laid over a river, with matting or brushwood covered with earth upon them, and are usually full of holes. These precarious structures had just been replaced after the summer rains. A _mapu_ usually goes ahead to test their solidity. The region is extremely fertile, producing fine crops of rice, wheat, barley, millet, buckwheat, cotton, sesamum, castor oil, beans, maize, tobacco, capsicums, egg plant, peas, etc. But Russian and American kerosene is fast displacing the vegetable oils for burning, and is producing the same revolution in village evening life which it has effected in the Western Islands of Scotland. I never saw a Korean hamlet south of Phyöng-yang, however far from the main road, into which kerosene had not penetrated. I was obliged to halt for the night when only 10 _li_ from Song-do, all the more regretfully, because the people were unwilling to receive a foreigner, and the family room which I occupied, only 8 feet 6 inches by 6 feet, was heated up to 85°, was poisoned with the smell of cakes of rotting beans, and was so alive with vermin of every description that I was obliged to suspend a curtain over my bed to prevent them from falling upon it. The next morning, in an atmosphere which idealized everything, we reached Song-do, or Kai-söng, now the second city in the kingdom, once the capital of Hon-jö, one of the three kingdoms which united to form Korea, and the capital of Korea five centuries ago. A city of 60,000 people, lying to the south of Sang-dan San, with a wall ten miles in circumference running irregularly over heights, and pierced by double-roofed gateways, with a peaked and splintered ridge extending from Sang-dan San to the northeast, its higher summits attaining altitudes of from 2,000 to 3,000 feet, it has a striking resemblance to Seoul.