Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 23.pdf/330

 Ancient Criminal Punishment in Korea 'Bv MAURICE E. ALLEN

T MAY have been chance, or Dame Fortune, or plainly and simply my usual good luck, which some years

ago, during the course of a winter spent in Geneva, led me to frequent

the microscopic secondhand book-stores which line the narrow and precipitous streets in the old quarter of the city, in the shadow of St. Pierre. These little shops, many of which

while sundry gouges on the smooth and polished surfaces testiﬁed to the care less ﬁnger nails of a past generation. On the inside, after a long and minutely subdivided title in which the merits of the work were set forth with a wealth of adjectives, one learned that the book

had been published in Paris, in the year 1749, "chez Didot, Libraire, Quai des

aristocratic families, all retain a certain unique and characteristic atmosphere, which seems to make the dead past

Augustins, a la Bible d'or." Royalist patriotism was further satisﬁed by the qualifying clause: “Avec Approbation et Privilege du Roi.”, What interested me especially, how ever, was the fact that this particular

live again within their doors.

volume was largely devoted to a descrip

occupy the basements of what were at

one time the residences of the most

Much of

their store of soiled and musty volumes and dingy engravings may at ﬁrst sight

appear trash; but there is gold in the dross for the ﬁnding, and what appears worthless to one may prove a very treasure trove to another. The great age of many of the books, while nothing uncommon in one of the oldest of Euro pean cities, may well fascinate the visitor from a land where the early

ﬁfties indicates a respectable antiquity, and where national history has been written largely in a single century.

While ﬁngering over a pile of old leather bound books, all somewhat the worse for wear, I came across one little

brown volume, rich in red and gold, which toire Générale bore the des impressive Voyages." title,It“His was one of a number comprised in the same series and was printed in the old French of the middle eighteenth century, with its quaint long stemmed 5's and rounded verbs. The leather cover was chafed and rubbed as if by constant handling,

tion of Korea, a circumstance which ex cited in me a more than passing interest, because of the fact that that country was my birthplace and had been my home until the call of school and college

brought me back over the Paciﬁc. The demand for ancient histories of the "Hermit Kingdom" must have been at a low ebb, for I was able to get the book at a very reasonable ﬁgure, the proprietor seeming quite elated at being

enabled to dispose of what he evidently regarded as a diminutive white elephant. The narrative proved to be based principally on the accounts of two men:

Henry Hamel, secretary of the ship Sparrow Hawk, which was wrecked off the southern coast of Korea in the year 1653; and Father Regis, a French mis sionary who was employed in making a map of China in the years 1709-1711.

Father Regis was one of that fearless and devoted band of early Jesuit mis sionaries against whose intrepid bravery and Christian courage not even tortures