Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/487

 First come the stories based upon the belief that animals can acquire the power to transform themselves into men. These are among the stories that children love best. There was the wild boar that drank of the water that had lain for twenty years in a human skull, and thus acquired power to assume the human shape, but with this fatal limitation, that if a dog looked him in the face he would be obliged to resume his natural shape. There is the fox which turned into a woman, an Oriental Circe, and worked the destruction of an empire. Now and again a centenarian toad assumes human shape, and acts as valet to the tiger, who is masquerading as a gentleman. A serpent turns into a beautiful maiden and lures a man to the brink of destruction, but, being thwarted, changes its tactics and infests his body with a myriad of little snakes, from which he is delivered by the sparrows, who kindly peck holes in his skin and let the reptiles out. There is a clear line of demarcation between the good and the bad animals. The fox, tiger, wild boar, serpent and toad are always bad, while the rabbit, frog, tortoise and dragon are invariably good. As the tiger is the most destructive animal in Korea, we are not surprised to find a great number of stories, telling how he turned into a girl and came crying to the door of a house in order to lure out its inmates. This is the " bugaboo " story with which Korean children are frightened into obedience.

Many are the wonders worked by the tokgabis, the imps that delight to make trouble in the household. No Korean will profess to have seen one or to have been the victim of his tricks, but every Korean knows of someone else who has so suffered. They believe that these imps are the spirits of wicked men who have been refused entrance into the place of the blessed, and have no option but to haunt their former places of abode ; or they may be the spirits of good people who have died by violence, or under other painful circumstances, and cannot go to paradise because of the desire of revenge which burns in them. Sometimes they take the shape of a man with the lower half of his body gone,