When the Korean wife becomes a mother her position is improved. Girls, as being unable to support their parents in old age or to perform the ancestral rites, are not prized as boys are, yet they are neither superfluous nor unwelcome as in some Eastern countries. The birth of a girl is not made an occasion for rejoicing, but that of the firstborn son is, and after the name has been bestowed on him, the mother is known as “the mother of so and so.” The first step alone of the first boy is an occasion for family jubilation. Korean babies have no cradles, and are put to sleep by being tapped lightly on the stomach. [Illustration: A KOREAN LADY.] FOOTNOTES: [18] The notes on marriage customs which follow were given me by English-speaking Koreans and were taken down at the time. They apply chiefly to the middle class. CHAPTER X THE KOREAN PONY--KOREAN ROADS AND INNS A gray and murky morning darkening into drizzle, which thickened into a day’s pouring rain, was an inauspicious beginning of a long land journey, but the crawling up the north Han had become monotonous and change and action were desirable. Being an experienced muleteer, I had arranged the loads for each pony so equitably as to obviate the usual quarrel among the _mapu_ or grooms at starting! The men were not regular _mapu_, and were going chiefly to see the Diamond Mountain. One was well educated and gentlemanly, and the bystanders jeered at them for “loading like scholars.” They were a family party, and there were no disputes. My first experience of the redoubtable Korean pony was not reassuring. The men had never seen a foreign saddle and were half an hour in getting it “fixed.” Though a pony’s saddle, it was far too large for the creature’s minute body, the girths were half a yard and the crupper nearly a foot too long. The animal bit, squealed, struck with his fore and hind feet, and performed the singular feat of bending his back into such an inward curve that his small body came quite near the ground. The men were afraid of him, and it was only in the brief intervals of fighting that they dared to make a dash at the buckles. It was “tight-lacing” that he objected to.