Not having been able to learn anything about the route or any of its features, I was much surprised to find a very large population, not only along the river, but in the parallel valleys, many of them of great length and extreme fertility, in its neighborhood. It was only necessary to climb a ridge or hill to see numbers of these, given up to rice culture, and thickly sprinkled with farming villages. Along the river banks only, between Han Kang and Yöng-Chhun, there are 176 villages. Much of the soil is rich alluvium, from 5 to 11 feet deep, and most prolific, bearing two heavy crops a year (not rice lands) with little or no manure. There is on the whole an air of greater ease and prosperity about the Han valley than about any other region that I have seen in Korea.[13] The people are of fine physique and generally robust appearance. Some of them had evidently attained great age. There were a few sore eyes and some mild skin diseases, both produced by dirt, but there were no sickly-looking people; infants abounded. Except for a monastery and temple, both Buddhist, not far from Seoul, and the Confucian temples at the magistracies, there were no signs of any other cult than that of dæmons. There were two shrines containing _mirioks_, in both cases water-worn boulders chafed into some resemblance to humanity; spirit shrines on heights; and under large trees heaps of stones sacred to dæmons; tall posts, with the tops rudely cut into something suggestive of distorted human faces, painted black and blue, with straw ropes with dependent straw tassels, like those denoting Shinto shrines in Japan, stretched across the road to prevent the ingress of malignant spirits, and trees with many streamers of rag, as well as worn-out straw shoes hanging in their branches, as offerings to these beings. The dwellings do not vary much, except that the roofs of the better class are tiled. In villages where there is a resident _yang-ban_ or squire-noble, his house is usually pretentious, and covers a considerable area, but yields in stateliness to the family tomb, always on a hill slope, a great grass mound on a grass platform backed by horseshoe-shaped grass banks, and usually by a number of fine pines. In front of the mound is invariably a stone altar on two stone drums, stone posts which support the canopy used when sacrifices are offered to the spirit of the deceased, and stone lanterns. A few of the grander tombs are approached by a short avenue of stone figures of warriors, horses, servants, and sheep.[14]