At the head of the triumphant party were Cho T’ă gu, Ch’oé Kyu-sŭ and Ch’oé Sŭk-hang. They began the performance of their official duties by bribing the palace women and eunuchs to kill the heir to the throne. The plan was to shoot him “by mistake” while pretending to hunt for a white fox which they said was haunting the palace. The heir was informed however and took measures to insure his own safety. He asked to have two of the palace women killed and two of the eunuchs, but the king himself was in mortal fear of the Sorons, whom he had brought back to power, and he dared not do so. Thereupon the heir said “I will resign and go out from the palace and become one of the common people.” The Noron party were not idle. They knew that the Sorons would soon be hunting their heads, and so they attempted to take the offensive by assassinating the king; but, as usually happened, they were betrayed, and terrible reprisals followed. Twelve of the Noron leaders were beheaded and hundreds were beaten to death or banished. It is gravely stated that in this one connection eighteen hundred men lost their lives. The close of the king’s second year witnessed a severe famine on the island of Quelpart and the king sent thither 7,000 bags of grain and remitted the tax of horses, for which that island has been from time immemorial celebrated. The desperate state of affairs at this juncture is well illustrated by two incidents. First, the king was so enamored of the Soron party that he took Mok Ho-ryong, their leader, outside the gate one night and sacrificed a white horse and, tasting its blood, swore that until time’s end Mok Ho-ryong’s descendants should hold high office under the government. Second, the Soron officials went to the shrine of the great Song Si-ryŭl and tearing the tablet from its place, dragged it through the filth of a dung-hill. Meanwhile we hear nothing about the people and the country. The government was not for them and they probably cared as little for it as it did for them. But even these sanguinary scenes could not entirely stop the march of enlightenment, for we learn that at this very time foreign clocks, barometers and water-hose were being brought into Korea from Peking where they had been introduced by foreigners. This was done by the envoy Yi I-myŭng who met missionaries in Peking. He had a conversation with them on the subject of religion and professed to find great similarity between Christian doctrines and those of the Chinese classics.