A torrent of rain fell, and the day’s journey consisted in splashing through deep mud, fording swollen streams, because the bridges which crossed them were rotten, getting wet to the skin, and getting partially dry by sitting on the hot floor of a hovel called an inn at the noonday halt, along with a steaming crowd of all sorts and conditions of men in clean and dirty white clothes. The road by which we travelled is the main one from Seoul to the eastern treaty port of Wön-san. It passes through rice valleys with abundant irrigation, and along the sides of bare hills. Goods and travellers were not to be looked for in such weather, but there were a few strings of coolies loaded with tobacco, and a few more taking dried fish and dried seaweed, the latter a great article of diet, from Wön-san to the capital. _Pangas_, or water pestles for hulling rice, under rude thatched sheds, were numerous. These work automatically, and their solemn thud has a tone of mystery. The machine consists of a heavy log centred on a pivot, with a box at one end and a pestle at the other. Water from a stream with some feet of fall is led into the box, which when full tips over its contents and bears down one end of the log, when the sudden rise, acting on the pestle at the other end, brings it down with a heavy thud on the rice in the hollowed stone, which serves as a mortar. Where this simple machine does not exist the work is performed by women. Denuded hillsides gave place to wooded valleys with torrents much resembling parts of Japan, the rain fell in sheets, and quite in the early afternoon, on reaching the hamlet of Sar-pang Kori, the _mapu_ declined to proceed farther, and there I had my first experience of a Korean inn. Many weeks on that and subsequent journeys showed me that this abominable shelter, as I then thought it, may be taken as a fair average specimen, and many a hearty meal and good sound sleep may be enjoyed under such apparently unpropitious circumstances. There are regular and irregular inns in Korea. The irregular inn differs in nothing from the ordinary hovel of the village roadway, unless it can boast of a yard with troughs, and can provide entertainment for beast as well as for man. The regular inn of the towns and large villages consists chiefly of a filthy courtyard full of holes and heaps, entered from the road by a tumble-down gateway. A gaunt black pig or two tethered by the ears, big yellow dogs routing in the garbage, and fowls, boys, bulls, ponies, _mapu_, hangers-on, and travellers’ loads make up a busy scene.