In accordance with their promise, the Japanese evacuated the city on the very day appointed, and Gen. Yi Yŭ-song, who seems to have recovered his health rapidly after he found that the Japanese did not mean fight, entered the city the following day. The condition in which he found things is almost indescribable. The Ancestral Temple and three palaces had been burned. Only the Nam-pyŭl-gung, which the invaders had used as headquarters, was standing. The country all about was lying fallow and a great famine stared the Koreans in the face. A thousand bags of rice were hastily brought and made up into soup or gruel, mixed with pine leaves, and a few of the starving thousands were fed. As Gen. Sa Tă-su was passing along the street he saw a young child trying to suck milk from the breast of its dead mother. The sight aroused his compassion and he carried the child to his quarters and ordered it to be cared for. Rice was so scarce that a whole piece of cotton cloth could be purchased with about three quarts of it. A horse cost but three pecks of rice. Famishing men fought and killed each other, the victors eating the vanquished, sucking the marrow from the bones and then dying themselves of surfeit. It is even said that when a drunken Chinese soldier vomited, half starved men would crawl to the place and fight over the possession of this horrible substitute for food. This state of things naturally brought on an epidemic of the native fever, a species of typhus, and the dead bodies of its victims lay all along the road, the head of one being pillowed on the breast of another. The dead bodies in and immediately around Seoul were gathered and piled in a heap outside the Water Mouth Gate and it is affirmed that the pile was ten feet higher than the wall. It was on the twentieth of the fourth moon that Gen. Yi entered Seoul. He took up his quarters in the Nam-pyŭl-gung. He seemed to be in no haste to pursue the Japanese, so Gen. Yu Sŭng-nyong hinted that as the Japanese were in full flight it might be well to hurry after them and cut them down as occasion offered. The Chinese general had no intention of leaving his comfortable quarters that soon, but he gave consent to the project of pursuit and detailed 10,000 men under the lead of Gen Yi Yŭ-băk. A day or so later this doughty warrior returned saying that he had a pain in the leg. So ended the first attempt at pursuit. Then the Korean Gen. Kwŭn Ryŭl came in from P’a-ju and urged that there be immediate pursuit, but for some unexplained reason the Chinese commander forbade it, and the native accounts even add that he sent secretly and had the boats on the Han destroyed so as to render pursuit of the Japanese impossible.