Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/500

 years after this, the King of Korea, masquerading like Haroun al Raschid of old, peeped through a window and saw an aged woman trying to make one egg stand upon another, but always without success. But even as he looked, behold! the impossible was done. He demanded admittance and, after he had heard the story, gave the woman ample revenge.

A young girl whose father and brother have been wrongfully done to death by the Prime Minister retires to a mountain retreat, and practises the sword dance with the purpose of becoming so proficient that she will be called upon to dance before the court and thus will secure an opportunity to kill the Prime Minister's son. Meanwhile that son has been disowned by the Prime Minister and wanders away among the mountains, where he accidentally meets the girl and persuades her to marry him, promising to let her go when her destiny calls. The boy has been told by a fortune-teller that he will die on his eighteenth birthday. Neither of them tells the other what is in store, and the girl never dreams that she has married the man that she must kill if she is to keep her oath. It would take too long to unravel the plot, but the reader can see that all sorts of complications are possible.

Korea has also its stories of detectives and their wiles. The custom of sending government detectives to the country to spy upon governors and prefects and to right the wrongs of the people forms an easy hook upon which to hang many an interesting tale. These are crude compared with the complicated plots of the West, and yet now and again situations occur that would do credit to Sherlock Holmes himself. In the human heart there is a passionate love of justice. In the end the right must, prevail. Koreans evidently think so, for though there are tragedies enough in actual life there are none in Korean fiction. Things come out right in the end. The Korean may be much of a fatalist, but he is not a pessimist. His fatalism is of that cheerful type that leads him to take things as they come. We may rightly say that the comic muse fills the whole stage of Korean drama. It is the villain only that gets killed off.