But the wind, with the mercury at 26°, was awful, gripping the heart and benumbing the brain. I have not felt anything like it since I encountered the “devil wind” on the Zagros heights in Persia. At some distance from our destination Mr. Yi, Im, and the _mapu_ begged me to halt, as they could no longer face it, though the accommodation for man and beast at Tol Maru, where we put up, was the worst imaginable, and the large village the filthiest, most squalid, and most absolutely poverty-stricken place I saw in that land of squalor. The horses were crowded together, and their baffled attempts at fighting were only less hideous than the shouts and yells of the _mapu_, who were constantly being roused out of a sound sleep to separate them. My room was 8 feet by 6, and much occupied by the chattels of the people, besides being alive with cockroaches and other forms of horrid life. The dirt and discomfort in which the peasant Koreans live are incredible. An uninteresting tract of country succeeded, and some time was occupied in threading long treeless valleys, cut up by stony beds of streams, margined by sandy flats, inundated in summer, and then covered chiefly with withered reeds, asters, and artemisia, a belated aster every now and then displaying its untimely mauve blossom. All these and the dry grasses and weeds of the hillsides were being cut and stacked for fuel, even brushwood having disappeared. This work is done by small boys, who carry their loads on wooden saddles suited to their size. That region is very thinly peopled, only a few hamlets of squalid hovels being scattered over it, and cultivation was rare and untidy, except in one fine agricultural valley where wheat and barley were springing. No animals, except a breed of pigs not larger than English terriers, were to be seen. One of the most dismal and squalid “towns” on this route is Shur-hung, a long rambling village of nearly 5,000 souls, and a magistracy, built along the refuse-covered bank of a bright, shallow stream. As if the Crown official were the upas tree, the town with a _yamen_ is always more forlorn than any other. In Shur-hung the large and once handsome _yamen_ buildings are all but in ruins, and so is the Confucian temple, visited periodically, as all such temples are, by the magistrate, who bows before the tablet of the “most holy teacher” and offers an animal in sacrifice. The Korean official is the vampire which sucks the lifeblood of the people. We had crossed the Tao-jol, the boundary between the provinces of Kyöng-hwi and Hwang-hai, and were then in the latter. Most officials of any standing live in Seoul for pleasure and society, leaving subordinates in charge, and as their tenure of office is very brief, they regard the people within their jurisdiction rather with reference to their squeezeableness than to their capacity for improvement.