Funerals usually go out near dusk with a great display of colored lanterns, but I was fortunate enough to see an artisan’s corpse carried out by daylight. First came four drums and a sort of fife perpetrating a lively tune as an accompaniment to a lively song. These were followed by a hearse, if it may be called so, a domed and gaudily painted construction with a garland of artificial flowers in the centre of the dome, a white Korean coat thrown across the roof, and four flagstaffs with gay flags at the four corners, bamboo poles, flower-wreathed, forming a platform on which the hearse was borne by eight men in peaked yellow hats garlanded with blue and pink flowers. Bouquets of the same were disposed carelessly on the front and sides of the hearse, the latter being covered with shield-shaped flags of gaudily colored muslin. The chief mourner followed, completely clothed in sackcloth, wearing an umbrella-shaped hat over 4 feet in diameter, and holding a sackcloth screen before his face by two bamboo handles. Men in flower-wreathed hats surrounded him, some of them walking backwards and singing. He looked fittingly grave, but it is a common custom for those who attend the chief mourner to try to make him laugh by comic antics and jocular remarks. There are “burial clubs” in Seoul to which 100,000 _cash_ are contributed (then worth about thirty-three dollars, silver). The first man to die receives 30,000 _cash_, the second 33,000, and the third 37,000. This man had belonged to one of these, which accounts for an artisan having such a handsome funeral. Mourners dress in straw-colored hempen cloth, and all wear the enormous hats mentioned before, which so nearly conceal the face that the carrying of the grass-cloth screen is almost a work of supererogation. A mourner may not enter the palace grounds, and as mourning for a father lasts for three years, a courtier thus bereaved is for that time withdrawn from Court. Among the curious customs mainly of Chinese origin connected with death are the dressing the dying person in his best clothes when death is very close at hand. The very poor are buried coffinless in a wrapping of straw, and are carried by two men on a bier, the nature of the burden being concealed by hoops covered with paper.