Unlike Venice, Seoul should not be approached after dark, but we arrived late at night, and drove in rickshas through ill-lighted streets and over endless stones to our destination, Miss Finder’s rest-house for missionaries, excellently situated in the upper part of the town. With morning light we received a different and beautiful impression of the town. It is encircled within lofty hills of granite that change in colour at different times of day from gold and steel to deep blue. Formerly high walls surrounded it, pierced by noble gateways, but these walls are rapidly disappearing to form material for building Japanese houses of truly Philistine ugliness. Every day sees new and deplorable changes in the way of picturesqueness, and one is tempted to say that even sanitation may be too dearly bought. We started on a lovely spring morning to visit the old palace, which, subject to certain rules, is now thrown open to the public at a small charge. The first rule is that visitors must be respectably dressed, the next that they must not catch birds or fish, and so on. The Imperial Palace covers a large area of ground, and is surrounded by lofty walls, in which there are eight or ten doorways, surmounted by the typical curved and tiled roofs. It looks like a small walled town, and used to contain some 3000 persons. The main entrance to the palace is at the end of a wide thoroughfare, adorned with fine stone animals on pedestals, and flanked by official buildings on each side, which, alas, are being pulled down to be replaced by Japanese buildings. This thoroughfare was a gay and busy scene. The Korean dress is eminently picturesque, and many of the women wear brilliant cloaks of lettuce or apple green with scarlet streamers; this cloak depends from the crown of the head to below the knees; the sleeves are never used, nor indeed could they be used, as the space for the neck is filled in with a piece of white material which acts as a cap and raises the coat several inches above the proper height. This strange garment is said to have been originally a man’s coat, and the wives used to wear it (as so many Eastern women do) to conceal their figures in the streets. It certainly adds a most charming note of colour to the streets of Seoul. The ordinary dress of the women is entirely white; it consists of a short coat, baggy trousers, and large pleated apron completely enclosing them and acting as a skirt. The lower class women are not careful to prevent there being a gap between the upper and lower garments; as they seem to be always nursing a baby, they no doubt think the costume was devised to suit that purpose. My sketch shows the dress with the addition of the winter cap. [Illustration: KOREAN WOMAN]