Visiting villages and small towns, only to find the first a collection of mud hovels, and the last mud hovels with the addition of ruinous official buildings and a forlorn Confucian temple, climbing to ridges bordering the Han to get a view of fertile and populous valleys, conversing with and interrogating the people through Mr. Miller and his servant, taking geographical notes, temperatures, altitudes, barometric readings, and measurements of the river (nearly all unfortunately lost in a rapid on the downward journey), collecting and drying plants, photographing, and developing negatives under difficulties, all the blankets and waterproofs in the boat being requisitioned for the creation of a “dark room”--all these occupations made up busy and interesting days. The first two days were spent in turning the flank of the range on which is the so-called fortress of Nam Han, with its priest soldiers, one of the four which are supposed to guard Seoul and offer refuge in times of trouble. On the right bank there are many villages of farmers, woodcutters, and charcoal burners, and on the left an expanse of cultivated sandy soil between the mountains and the river, there a broad rapid stream rippling brightly over white sand or golden gravel. After passing the Yang-kun magistracy, a large village with a long street, where a whole fleet of _sampans_ was loading with country produce for the capital, and a number of junks were unloading salt, the Han makes a sharp bend to the south, and after a long rapid expands into a very broad stream. The valley broadens also, and becomes flat, the hills, absolutely denuded even of scrub, are low, and recede from the river; their serrated black ridges of rock, and their deeply scored, corrugated, flushed sides, which spring had scarcely tinged with green, are forbidding, and though the valley was green with young wheat, that is quite the most monotonous and uninteresting part of the journey. After circumventing the fine fortress summit of Nam Han, the river enters the mountains. From that time up to the head of possible navigation, the scenery in its variety, beauty, and unexpectedness exhausts the vocabulary of admiration.