In this great human hive, the ordinary sightseer finds his vocation gone. The inhabitants constitute the “sight” of Seoul. The great bronze bell, said to be the third largest in the world, is one of the few “sights” usually seen by strangers. It hangs in a bell tower in the centre of the city, and bears the following inscription:-- “Sye Cho the Great, 12^{th} year Man cha [year of the cycle] and moon, the 4^{th} year of the great Ming Emperor Hsüan-hua [A.D. 1468], the head of the bureau of Royal despatches, Sye Ko chyeng, bearing the title Sa Ka Chyeng, had this pavilion erected and this bell hung.” This bell, whose dull heavy boom is heard in all parts of Seoul, has opened and closed the gates for five centuries. The grand triple gateway of the Royal Palace with its double roof, the old audience hall in the Mulberry Gardens, and the decorative roofs of the gate towers, are all seen in an hour. There remains the Marble Pagoda, seven centuries old, so completely hidden away in the back-yard of a house in one of the foulest and narrowest alleys of the city, that many people never see it at all. As I was intent on photographing some of the reliefs upon it, I visited it five times, and each time with fresh admiration; but so _wedged_ in is it, that one can only get any kind of view of it by climbing on the top of a wall. Every part is carved, and the flat parts richly so, some of the tablets representing Hindu divinities, while others seem to portray the various stages of the soul’s progress towards Nirvana. The designs are undoubtedly Indian, modified by Chinese artists, and this thing of beauty stands on the site of a Buddhist monastery. It is a thirteen-storied pagoda, but three stories were taken off in the Japanese invasion three centuries ago, and placed on the ground uninjured. So they remained, but on my last visit children had defaced the exquisite carving, and were offering portions for sale. Not far off is another relic of antiquity, a decorated and inscribed tablet standing on the back of a granite turtle of prodigious size. Outside the west gate, on a plain near the Peking Pass, was a roofed and highly decorated arch of that form known as the _pailow_, and close by it a sort of palace hall, in which every new sovereign of Korea waited for the coming of a special envoy from Peking, whom he joined at the _pailow_, accompanying him to the palace, where he received from him his investiture as sovereign.