On such an incomparable day everything looked at its very best, but also at its very worst, for the brilliant sunshine lit up desolations sickening to contemplate,--a prosperous city of 80,000 inhabitants reduced to decay and 15,000--four-fifths of its houses destroyed, streets and alleys choked with ruins, hill slopes and vales once thick with Korean crowded homesteads, covered with gaunt hideous remains--fragments of broken walls, _kang_ floors, _kang_ chimneys, indefinite heaps in which roofs and walls lay in unpicturesque confusion--and still worse, roofs and walls standing, but doors and windows all gone, suggesting the horror of human faces with their eyes put out. Everywhere there were the same scenes, miles of them, and very much of the desolation was charred and blackened, shapeless, hideous, hopeless, under the mocking sunlight. Phyöng-yang was not taken by assault; there was no actual fighting in the city, both the Chinese who fled and the Japanese who occupied posed as the friends of Korea, and all this wreck and ruin was brought about not by enemies, but by those who professed to be fighting to give her independence and reform. It had gradually come to be known that the “_wojen_ (dwarfs) did not kill Koreans,” hence many had returned. Some of these unfortunate fugitives were picking their way among the heaps, trying to find indications which might lead them to the spots where all they knew of home once existed; and here and there, where a family found their walls and roof standing, they put a door and window into one room and lived in it among the ruins of five or six. When the Japanese entered and found that the larger part of the population had fled, the soldiers tore out the posts and woodwork, and often used the roofs also for fuel, or lighted fires on house floors, leaving them burning, when the houses took fire and perished. They looted the property left by the fugitives during three weeks after the battle, taking even from Mr. Moffett’s house $700 worth, although his servant made a written protest, the looting being sanctioned by the presence of officers. Under these circumstances the prosperity of the most prosperous city in Korea was destroyed. If such are the results of war in the “green tree,” what must they be in the “dry”?