Soldiers, writers, _yamen_ runners, and men of the _yang-ban_ and literary classes combined with the loafers of the town to compose a crowd which by its buzzing and shouting, and tearing off the paper from my latticed door, gave me a fatiguing and hideous two hours, a Korean crowd being only _un_bearable when it is led by men of the literary class, who, as in China, indulge in every sort of vulgar impertinence. Eventually I was smuggled into the women’s apartments, where I was victimized in other ways by insatiable curiosity. The women of the lower classes in Korea are ill-bred and unmannerly, far removed from the gracefulness of the same class in Japan or the reticence and kindliness of the Chinese peasant women. Their clothing is extremely dirty, as if the men had a monopoly of their ceaseless laundry work, which everywhere goes on far into the night. Every brookside has its laundresses squatting on flat stones, dipping the soiled clothes in the water, laying them on flat stones in tightly rolled bundles and beating them with flat paddles, a previous process consisting of steeping them in a ley made of wood ashes. Bleached under the brilliant sun and very slightly glazed with rice starch, after being beaten for a length of time with short quick taps on a wooden roller with club-shaped “laundry sticks,” common white cotton looks like dull white satin, and has a dazzling whiteness which always reminds me of St. Mark’s words concerning the raiment at the Transfiguration, “so as no fuller on earth can white them.” This wearing of white clothes, and especially of white wadded clothes in winter, entails very severe and incessant labor on the women. The coats have to be unpicked and put together again each time that they are washed, and though some of the long seams are often joined with paste, there is still much sewing to be done. Besides this the Korean peasant woman makes all the clothing of the household, does all the cooking, husks and cleans rice with a heavy pestle and mortar, carries heavy loads to market on her head, draws water, in remote districts works in the fields, rises early and takes rest late, spins and weaves, and as a rule has many children, who are not weaned till the age of three. The peasant woman may be said to have no pleasures. She is nothing but a drudge, till she can transfer some of the drudgery to her daughter-in-law. At thirty she looks fifty, and at forty is frequently toothless. Even the love of personal adornment fades out of her life at a very early age. Beyond the daily routine of life it is probable that her thoughts never stray except to the dæmons, who are supposed to people earth and air, and whom it is her special duty to propitiate.