Page:Every-day life in Korea (1898).djvu/29

 Tiled roofs begin to leak. Here a mud wall, there the thatched roof of some poor Korean, falls with a crash. Streets and drains are washed as clean as in Philadelphia. Clothes and trunks grow moldy. Shoes removed at night are covered with green in the morning. You seem to grow moldy yourself. The entire system becomes relaxed, and great care needs to be exercised in the selection of food and drink. Then, when one's powers of resistance seem almost exhausted, the sun bursts forth with mid-summer force, and the thermometer ranges up to a limit of perhaps 90 degrees, Fahrenheit. Everything goes out upon the line to dry. One's spirits revive. Ungainly pith hats come oiit, for the westerner in Korea, as in so many other localities in the Orient, must protect the head against the direct rays of the sun. Mos- qiiitoes and bull-frogs make the nights melodious; then, after a few days of glorious sunshine, the rains commence again. The rainy season proper begins with July ist and ends the 15th of August; but not infrequently it lasts from late June to early September, a period of three months. At its close quinine becomes a table relish to ward off malaria.

But if the rainy season is trying, it would be a national calamity to be without it, for the rice ponds, to which the nation looks for the main staple in its year's supply of food, are carefully banked and terraced so as to drain from one into the other, and wait for the poured-out blessing of