The hamlets along the road were cheerfully busy. Millet was stacked in the village roadways, leaving only room for one laden animal to pass at a time, and as all the threshing of rice and grain is done with double flails also in the village street, one actually rides over the threshed product. The red or large millet is nearly as useful to the Korean as is the bamboo to the Chinese. Its stalks furnish fuel, material for mats and thick woven fences, and even for houses, for in Phyöng-an Do the walls are formed of bundles of millet stalks 8 feet high for the uprights, across which single stalks are laid, the interstices being filled up with mud. After two days of somewhat monotonous prettiness, beyond Shou-yang-yi the country became really beautiful. Some of the larger valleys were specially attractive, with abundance of fruit and other deciduous trees below the dark _Pinus sinensis_ on the hill slopes, and there were plenty of large villages with a general look of prosperity, everything, clothing included, being much cleaner than usual. There were fine views of lofty dog-tooth peaks, and of serrated ranges running east and west. Nearly every valley has its bright, rapid stream, on which the hills descend on one side in abrupt and much caverned limestone cliffs, the other side being level and fertile. The people there, and doubtless everywhere, were taken up entirely with their own concerns, the new system of taxation under which a fixed tax in money is levied on the assessed value of the land meeting with their approval. Events in Seoul had no interest for them. The recent murder of the Queen and the imprisonment of the King did not concern them, as there were no effects of either on their circumstances. After crossing the pass of Miriok Yang, 816 feet in altitude, in a romantic region, we entered poorer country with stony soil, often piled with large shingle by the violence of streams then perfectly dry.