On the very first day of the new year he proclaimed that all party strife must cease; that men must think and plan for the good of the whole country rather than for a particular party. As he was returning one day from a royal tomb a man beside the road shouted “There goes the man who poisoned his predecessor with shrimps.” Recognizing in this nothing but an attempt to keep open the old party sore, the king handled the man severely together with certain others of the Soron party who had instigated him to the outrage. From that day to this the Noron party has been uniformly in power. Party strife practically ceased, not by the dissolution of the other parties but because one party obtained such an overwhelming ascendency that the others died of starvation. Several things led to this result. A series of unsuccessful conspiracies on the part of the Soron party, each of which weakened it to the point of exhaustion; and secondly the extreme length of the reign, during which, with one short interval, the king held firmly to the Noron party. The closing act of his first year was a reform which he forced in the government dispensary. It had long been a rich morsel for conscienceless officials to fatten upon, but now the whole personnel of the institution was changed and it again performed its normal function of dispensing medicines for the public health. The king’s forbearance is seen in the fact that when a thief was caught, bearing upon his person a letter from two of the palace women asking him to procure for them a deadly poison, the king executed the thief but refused to proceed against the women, on the ground that they had no possible cause for wishing his death. We here meet the curious statement, not mentioned heretofore, that from the earliest times the Lords of Tsushima received seals from the king of Korea. At this time the daimyo of that island sent and asked the king to renew the custom, which had probably been discontinued for a short space of time. The king complied with the request and had the seal cut and sent. It is not possible to conclude from this that the daimyo of Tsushima considered himself a vassal of Korea, for it is not mentioned elsewhere in the Korean annals. We can form but one theory that will account for it. This seal may have been only for the purpose of identification to vouch for the authenticity of letters that might pass between Korea and Tsushima. The time may come when, in the light of facts not yet discovered, this incident may throw light on the early relations between Korea and Japan.