The situation might have been serious had a European man been with me, and the experiences of Mr. Campbell of the Consular Service, at Kapsan might have been repeated. No Englishman could have kept his temper in such circumstances from 8 P.M. till midnight. He would certainly have knocked somebody down, and then there would have been a fight. The ill-bred curiosity tires but does not annoy me, though it exceeded all bounds that night. Fortunately for me, a Korean gentleman is taught from his earliest boyhood that he must never lose his temper, and that it is a degradation to him to touch an inferior, therefore he must never strike a servant or one of the lower orders. At midnight, probably weary of our passivity, and anxious for sleep, the inn people consented to give me a room in the back-yard if I did not object to one “prepared for sacrifice,” and containing the ancestral tablets. The crowd then filled the back-yard, and attempted to pour into my room, when Im’s sorely-tried patience gave way for only the second time, and he knocked people down right and left. This, and the contents of a fire bowl which was upset in the scrimmage, helped to scatter the crowd, but it was there again at daylight, attempting to enter every time Im opened the door! The “room prepared for sacrifice” in aspect was a small barn, fearfully dirty and littered with rubbish, and bundles of rags, rope, and old shoes were tucked away among the beams and rafters. My camp-bed cut it exactly in half. In the inner half there was a dusty table, and behind it on a black stand a dusty black shrine, at the back of which was a four-leaved screen covered with long strips of paper, on which were poems in praise of the deceased. In front, dividing the room, and falling from the roof to the floor, was a curtain made of two widths of very dirty foreign calico. Among the poor, instead of setting food before the ancestral shrine twice or thrice daily during the three years of mourning for a parent, it is only placed there twice a month. In a small white wooden tablet within the shrine popular belief places the residence of the third soul of the deceased, as I have mentioned before.