The year 1753 was marked by two events of importance. A woman created a great disturbance in Whang-hă Province by claiming to be a Buddha and inciting the women everywhere to burn up the ancestral shrines. The trouble ended only when the king sent a special officer to seize and execute her. We are told that by this time the secret study of the tenets of Roman Catholicism had resulted in its wide diffusion in the provinces of Whang-hă and Kang-wŭn. There was uneasiness at court on account of the rumor that the people were throwing away their ancestral tablets, and the king ordered the governors of those provinces to put down the growing sect. This was more easily ordered than done, and as no deaths followed it is probable that the governors did little beside threaten and denounce. Two years later a work of importance was completed. The great sewer of the city was quite inadequate to carry away the sewage of the city and every time a heavy rain fell the sewer overflowed and the street from the great bell to the East Gate became a torrent. The king gave two million cash out of his private purse and the sewer was properly cleaned out. He also appointed a commission on sewerage and ordered that there be a systematic cleaning out every three years. We have now arrived at the thirty-eighth year of the reign, corresponding to the year 1761 A. D. Up to that time the reign had been a brilliant one, not because of military successes but because of social, economic and other reforms. So far, it stands side by side with the reign of Suk-jong Tă-wang, who with the aid of the illustrious Song Si-ryŭl, effected such far-reaching reforms. We have yet seen but few signs of that growing senility which forms such a marked characteristic of the remainder of this reign. The king was now over seventy years old and he had lost that vigor of mind which characterized the earlier years of his reign. But he still possessed all that imperiousness of will which likewise characterized him. Good judgment and will power should decline together or else the results may be disastrous, as is illustrated in the remaining years of his reign.