Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/351

 Miscellanea. 331

these influences as soon as possible. This they accomplished by placing these huge propped-up stones on the back of the current. Another story, giving the same reason, attributes it to the Manchus of a hundred years later. And I am inclined to believe the latter story. In the first place, the stones are too great for the Japanese to handle ; in the second place, the Japanese have never paid much attention to mountain influences. Again, the inborn hatred of the Korean for the Japanese would incline him to shift the odium for such a miserable deed from the Chinese to the Japanese. There are several hundred of these monsters in Kangwon province, so I am told. I myself have seen twenty and more.

I asked the old inn-keeper why he did not roll them over, set the current free, and get back the influence, but he said : "Alas ! it is too late." Koreans have a peculiar fatalism in their views of mountain influence. They feel that to disturb the regular course of fate would be worse for them than losing the influence.

Islands. — There is a peculiar superstition, common to all Korea, with regard to a supposed island in the Yellow Sea, called Nain Chosen (South Korea). They attribute to this place much of the supernatural, and yet people come from it, they say, to trade at Mok-p'o, a port recently opened to foreigners, in Chulla pro- vince (S.W. Korea). There is no such place, and yet the story of it is much more common to the natives than that of any real island in the vicinity.

Lake-spirits and Dragons. — Usually there is no spirit in a pool apart from those who may have fallen in and been drowned in it. Immediately on such occurrence, the spirit of the dead becomes the spirit of the pool, imprisoned, in fact, and cannot leave until some one else drowns and takes its place. Also those who die by tigers become tiger-spirits, and are so possessed until the tiger devours some one else, and so lets the spirit of the first victim free.

In lakes there are dragons ( Yong), and monsters less powerful than dragons, called Kang-cKulli. Dragons change from pool to pool, or " go up " {ol-la ka-ta), as the native says. I have seen one of the most famous pools of Korea, situated some sixty miles north of Seoul, near Song-do, and it was dark, and deep, and silent ; though only some thirty feet wide, it was beyond the eye to fathom, though the water was exceedingly clear. These dragons