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232 struck the Japan Sea. A journey of sixty miles along the coast brought him to Wen-san, one of the ports opened to trade by the treaties with foreign powers. Hence he followed the coast-line northward for six days, passing through a number of populous towns, to Puk-ch'eng. Trade, which was not active on the Seoul-Wen-san route, was particularly stirring along the east coast. It is mainly in Manchester cottons. Fairs were common between Wen-san and Puk-ch'eng—as they are in all the populous districts of Korea. "The road was always animated with a concourse of merry, brightly dressed people, wending their way to the market town; women carrying jars and baskets of melons, pears, chillies, etc., on their heads, and babies on their backs; bulls and carts laden with brushwood for fuel; produce of all kinds, including grain and dried fish, borne by ponies and men; sturdy, half-nude coolies, perspiring under lofty, wooden frameworks, to which assortments of earthenware pots and turned wooden dishes are attached; and, more numerous than all, the pleasure-seeker, or ku-kyeng-kun, in holiday dress, strutting along in company with a batch of friends, gesticulating, laughing, and cracking jokes productive of the most hilarious mirth. Such throngs greeted the foreigner with amused surprise, sometimes a trifle rudely, but always good-naturedly. The women, in most cases, behaved as properly conducted Korean women ought to do when their faces run the risk of being scanned by a stranger, and turned their backs upon him; yet frequently all scruples vanished before an overpowering curiosity to take in the particulars of so odd a costume, or to discuss the singularity of the equipage. The main street of the town or village is the marketplace. It often widens into a sort of place or square, where straw booths are hastily erected for the occasion; but, ordinarily, each man exposes his wares on some boards, or on a cloth spread on the ground in the best spot available. The articles for sale are of the simplest."

From Puk-ch'eng Mr. Campbell took the direct, across-country route through Kap-san, to Peik-tu-san, in preference to the more interesting circuitous route, because of the lateness of the season. Following the Peik-ch'eng River to its source, he then, next day, after leaving the city (September 24th), reached the crest of the range which here fringes the highlands of North Korea. The top of the pass, called Hu-ch'i Ryeng, is 4,300 feet above the sea; thence to the Yalu, at Hyei-san, a distance of a hundred miles, there was a gradual descent, with one remarkable irregularity, to an elevation of 2,800 feet. "The aspect of the country had completely changed. We had left some valleys producing rice and cotton, and had entered a plateau-like region, where these crops were impossible, their places being taken by oats, millet, and