It was all very charming, though a little wanting in life. True, there were butterflies and dragon-flies innumerable, and brilliant green and brown snakes in numbers, and at first the Han was cheery with mallard and mandarin-duck, geese and common teal. In the rice fields the imperial crane, the egret, and the pink ibis with the deep flush of spring on his plumage, were not uncommon, and peregrines, kestrels, falcons, and buzzards were occasionally seen. But the song-birds were few. The forlorn note of the night-jar was heard, and the loud, cheerful call of the gorgeous ringed pheasant to his dowdy mate; but the trilling, warbling, and cooing which are the charm of an English copsewood in springtime are altogether absent, the chatter of the blue magpie and the noisy flight of the warbler being poor substitutes for that entrancing concert. Of beast life, undomesticated, there were no traces, and the domestic animals are few. Sheep do not thrive on the sour natural grasses of Korea, and if goats are kept I never saw any. A small black pig not much larger than a pug is universal, and there are bulls and ponies about the better class of farms. There are big buff dogs, but these are kept only to a limited extent on the Han, in the idea that they attract the nocturnal visits of tigers. The dogs are noisy and voluble, and rush towards a stranger as if bent on attack; but it is mere bravado--they are despicable cowards, and run away howling at the shaking of a stick. Leopards, antelopes, and several species of deer are found among the mountains bordering the Han, but the beast by preëminence there, as throughout Korea, is the tiger. At first I was very incredulous regarding his existence and depredations. It was impossible to believe that peaceful agricultural valleys surrounded by hills, thinly clothed with dwarf oak scrub, could be ravaged by him, that dogs, pigs, and cattle are continually carried off by him, and that human beings visiting each other at night or belated on the roads are his frequent prey. But the constant repetition of tiger stories, the terror of the villagers, the refusal of _mapu_ and coolies to travel after dark, the certainty that in several places the loss of life had been recent, and that even in the trim settlement of Wön-san a boy and child had been seized the day before I arrived and had been eaten on the hillside above the town, have made me a believer. Possibly some of the depredations attributed to tigers may be really the work of leopards, which undoubtedly abound, and have been shot even within the walls of Seoul. High up the Han, in a very lovely lake-like stretch, there is a village recently deserted because of the persistency with which tigers had carried off its inhabitants. The Korean tiger, judging from its skin, in which the long hair grows out of a thick coat of fine fur, resembles the Manchurian tiger. I have heard of one which measured 13 feet 4 inches, but never saw a skin more than 11 feet 8 inches in