Beyond the mountains east of Yö Ju, the Han passes through a noble stretch of rich alluvium, bearing superb, and fairly clean crops, and bordered by low, serrated, denuded, and much corrugated ranges, faintly tinged with green. On this gently rolling plain are many towns and villages, among the larger of which are Won Ju, Chung Ju, Chöng-phyöng, and Tan-Yang, all on or near the river, by which they conveniently export their surplus produce, chiefly beans, tobacco, and rice, and receive in return their supplies of salt and foreign goods. Even at that season of low water the traffic was considerable. Higher up, the scenery changes. Lofty limestone bluffs, often caverned, rise abruptly from the river, and wall in the fertile and populous valleys which descend upon it, giving place higher up to grand basaltic formation, range behind range, terraces of columnar basalt occasionally appearing. It was a lovely season, warm days, cold nights, brilliant sunshine, great white masses of sunlit clouds on a sky of heavenly blue, distances idealized in a blue veil which was not a mist, flowers at their freshest, every bird that has a note or a cry vocal, butterflies and red and blue dragon-flies hovering over the grass and water, fish leaping, all nature awake and jubilant. And every rift and bluff had its own beauty of blossoming scarlet azaleas, or syringas, contorted or stately pines, and _Ampelopsis Veitchiana_ rose-pink in its early leafage. There was a note of gladness in the air. Eight days above Seoul, on the left bank of the river, there is a ruinous pagoda built of large blocks of hewn stone, standing solitary in the centre of a level plain formed by a bend of the Han. The people, on being asked about it, said, “When Korea was surveyed so long ago that nobody knows when, this was the centre of it.” They call it the “Halfway Place.” After that the only suggestions of antiquity are some stone foundations, and a few stone tombs among the trees, which, from their shape, may denote the sites of monasteries.