Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/477

 their clothes, nor strike back, nor tie tin cans to dogs' tails. They form what we may call the " Sunday-school literature " of the Koreans, and they are treated with the same contempt by the healthy Korean boy or girl as goody-goody talk is treated by normal children the world over.

While these stories are many in number, they are built on a surprisingly small number of models. After one gets used to the formulae, the first few lines of a story reveal to him the whole plot, including commencement, complications, climax, catastrophe and conclusion. For instance, there is the stock story of the boy whose parents treated him in a most brutal manner but who never made a word of complaint. Anticipating that they will end by throwing him into the well, he goes down one dark night by the aid of a rope and digs a side passage in the earth just above the surface of the water; and so when he is thrown in headlong the following day, he emerges from the water and crawls into this retreat unknown to his doting parents, who fondly imagine they have made all arrangements for his future. About the middle of the afternoon he crawls out, and faces his astonished parents with a sanctimonious look on his face, which, from one point of view, attests his filial piety, but from another says, " You dear old humbugs ! You can't get rid of me so easily as that." Be it noted, however, that the pathos of this story lies in its exaggerated description of how Korean children are sometimes treated.

We also have the case of the beautiful widow, the Korean Lucrece, who, when the King importuned her to enter his harem, seized a knife and cut off her own nose, thus ruining her beauty. Who can doubt that she knew that by this bold stroke she could retire on a fat pension and become the envy of all future widows?

Then there was the boy whose father lay dying of hunger. The youth whetted a knife, went in to his father's presence, cut a generous piece of flesh from his own thigh and offered it to his parent. The story takes no account of the fact that the old reprobate actually turned cannibal instead of dying like a decent