Crossing the clear flashing waters of the Tai-döng with our ponies in a crowded ferryboat, we found ourselves in the slush of the dark Water Gate, at all hours of the day crowded with water-carriers. There are no wells in the city, the reason assigned for the deficiency being that the walls enclose a boat-shaped area, and that the digging of wells would cause the boat to sink! The water is carried almost entirely in American kerosene tins. I lodged at the house of a broker, and had nice clean rooms for myself and Im, quite quiet, and with a separate access from the street. It was truly a luxury to have roof, walls, and floor papered with thick oiled paper much resembling varnished oak, but there was no hot floor, and I had to rely for warmth solely on the “fire bowl.” Taking a most diverting boy as my guide, I went outside the city wall, through some farming country to a Korean house in a very tumble-to-pieces compound, which he insisted was the dwelling of the American missionaries; but I only found a Korean family, and there were no traces of foreign occupation in glass panes let into the paper of the windows and doors. Nothing daunted, the boy pulled me through a smaller compound, opened a door, and pushed me into what was manifestly posing as a foreign room, gave me a chair, took one himself, and offered me a cigarette! I had reached the right place. It was a very rough Korean room, about the length and width of a N.W. Railway saloon carriage. It had three camp-beds, three chairs, a trunk for a table, and a few books and writing materials, as well as a few articles of male apparel hanging on the mud walls. I waited more than an hour, every attempt at departure being forcibly as well as volubly resisted by the urchin, imagining the devotion which could sustain educated men year after year in such surroundings, and then they came in hilariously, and we had a most pleasant evening. I shall say more of them later. It was a weird walk through ruins which looked ghostly in the starlight to my curious quarters in the densest part of the city by the Water Gate, where at intervals through the night I heard the beat of the sorcerer’s drum and the shrieking chant of the _mu-tang_. It may be taken for granted that every Korean winter day is splendid, but the following day in Phyöng-yang was heavenly. Three Koreans called on me in the morning, very courteous persons, but as Mr. Yi and I had parted company for a time on reaching the city, the interpretation was feeble, and we bowed and smiled, and smiled and bowed with tedious iteration without coming to much mutual understanding, and I was glad when the time came for seeing the city and battlefield under Mr. Moffett’s guidance.