Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/462

 come under my notice in which a nice young girl was sadly cheated. Her relatives went to see the young man that the go-between had provided and found him handsomely dressed and living, apparently, in a fine house; but when the ceremony was over he took her to a wretched hovel, where his father and mother and a large family lived huddled together like rabbits in a burrow. The deception was a most cruel one, for the girl had been reared in comparative luxury. Occasionally the go- between is brought to justice for such felonious dealing, but usually the girl would rather suffer in silence than have her name dragged before the public.

It is difficult to estimate the wages that female labour receives in Korea, because it depends almost entirely upon the skill and the rapidity with which the work is done. Doubtless the dancing-girl gets the best pay of all, and next to her perhaps the lady physician. Then come the acrobats and fortune-tellers. The wet-nurse, or " milk-mother," is well paid, but her living is precarious. The same is true of the go-between. The teacher in a gentleman's family gets no salary at all, only a present now and then. The female physician gets her chair-coolie hire and about a dollar for each visit. The acrobat may get as low as foUr dollars a month or as high as sixty. The fortune-teller gets eight cents for each fortune that she tells. This represents two hours' work, for it is no light matter to be turned off by a mere glance at the palm. Go-betweens get from four to eight dollars for each case. The honest ones are, of course, the surest to find steady employment. The woman whose province it is to apply cosmetics to the faces of prospective brides receives some sixteen dollars for each operation, and anyone who has seen a Korean bride in her stucco will say the money is well earned.

A good seamstress or comb-maker or head-band maker will earn a dollar a day, while a wet nurse will get forty cents and her food, but if a foreigner wants to employ one, he will have to pay twenty dollars a month and support her lazy husband into