Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/497

 Korean, which keeps him cheerful and patient through centuries of - what shall we say? - anything but ideal government.

A boy accidentally shot his parent and came weeping to the prefect, who had not the heart to execute the penalty of the law on him. But the prefect's son, coming at the moment and seeing his father's perplexity, asked the cause, and, being told, exclaimed: "The boy must be killed. If his heart had been right, he would not have waited for the law to punish him; he would have killed himself. It is plain that his tears are only to excite pity." So the prefect sent the boy up to Seoul for execution.

A hunter had wounded a fox and was chasing it down when a dog ran out of a house and caught the animal. The owner of the dog claimed the game. The magistrate decided as follows : " It is evident that what the hunter was after was the animal's skin, while the dog thought only of its flesh. Let each have what he was after."

Early one morning at a country inn a good horse was stolen and a poor spavined brute was left in its place. The prefect was appealed to. He ordered that the miserable animal that had been left be deprived of water for two days and then set free upon the road. Of course it went straight for its former master's house in a distant village, and there the stolen horse was found.

When we speak of myth, we take the word in its strict meaning, some extra-natural origin of a natural phenomenon. At the very start we must say that the Korean imagination has never been capable of those grand flights of fancy which produced the enchanting myths of Greece. Nor has it been virile enough or elemental enough to evolve the stern heroes of the Norse mythology. The Greek, the Roman, the Scandinavian pantheons are filled with figures that loom gigantic and awful, while in Korea these agencies all seem, somehow, less than man; sometimes craftier, often stronger, but seldom worthier or better. So, instead of giving us a Phcebus Apollo to lead out the chariot