Similar remarks apply to the prefectural town of Nang-chhön, where we again wasted some hours, while Kim’s rice was first bargained for and then cleaned. At that point there is a fine deep stretch of the river 230 yards broad abounding in fish. From Nang-chhön we dropped down the Han to a deep and pretty bay on which the small village of Paik-kui Mi is situated, where we halted for Sunday, our last day in the _sampan_, which had been a not altogether comfortless home for five weeks and a half. FOOTNOTES: [17] Class privileges are now abolished, on paper at least, but their tradition carries weight. CHAPTER IX KOREAN MARRIAGE CUSTOMS Paik-kui Mi was not without a certain degree of life on that Sunday. A _yang-ban’s_ steward impressed boats for the gratuitous carriage of tiles to Seoul, which caused a little feeble excitement among the junkmen. There was a sick person, and a _mu-tang_ or female exorcist was engaged during the whole day in the attempt to expel the malevolent dæmon which was afflicting him, the process being accompanied by the constant beating of a drum and the loud vibrating sound of large cymbals. Lastly, there was a marriage, and this deserves more than a passing notice, marriage, burial, and exorcism, with their ceremonials, being the outstanding features of Korea.[18] The Korean is nobody until he is married. He is a being of no account, a “hobbledehoy.” The wedding-day is the entrance on respectability and manhood, and marks a leap upwards on the social ladder. The youth, with long abundant hair divided in the middle and plaited at the back, wearing a short, girdled coat, and looking as if he had no place in the world though he may be quite grown up, and who is always taken by strangers for a girl, is transformed by the formal reciprocal salutations which constitute the binding ceremony of marriage. He has received the tonsure, and the long hair surrounding it is drawn into the now celebrated “topknot.” He is invested with the _mangan_, a crownless skullcap or fillet of horsehair, without which, thereafter, he is never seen. He wears a black hat and a long full coat, and his awkward gait is metamorphosed into a dignified swing. His boy companions have become his inferiors. His name takes the equivalent of “Mr.” after it; honorifics must be used in addressing him--in short, from being a “nobody” he becomes a “somebody.”