It is the City of Ichabod. A few years ago—a few, that is, in the life of a city—Corea was educating the Japanese people in the arts; Satsuma ware was born in Seoul. 'To-day there is not a piece of porcelain to be bought in the city worth carrying away, A few years ago it took an army of 130,000 men under the greatest. general Japan' has ever had, to conquer the country. To-day the advent of thirty American marines threw 150,000 Coreans into a panic, Yesterday I visited one of the old laces, Pushing the door open to enter, almost pushed it off its hinges; the spacious entrance-terrace is a mulberry orchard; grass grows in the stables; the throne on which the king sat to receive his ministers is black with mildew; the splendid carvings are rotting from the lofty roofs; not a soul sets foot in these deserted halls, Oadest of all, as we stood in silence by the great pillars of the throne-room—this actual fact, not an imaginative correspondent's white lie, ask Mr, Consul Ford who was with me—a dove cooed to ne from her nest in one of the carven capitals, It was the vision of Omar Khayyam "The palace that to heaven its columns threw, And kings the forehead on its threshold drew, 1 saw the solitary ring-dove there, And 'Coo, coo, coo,' she cried, and Coo, Seoul (pronounced variously Sool, Sow, and Say-col, and erroneously marked on almost all maps as Kinkitau, the name of the province) is a city of about 150,000 people, of whom 500 are Chinese, '400 Japanese, and 25 Europeans and Anericans, excluding missionaries. It is surrounded by a more or less dilapidated wall, pierced by several imposing gateways, all of which are closed at sunset at the sound of a great bell, and the keys Pltced for the might in charge of the ing's guard at the palace. On one side of the city a second wall encloses the palace and the royal domain, and from the farthest point of this a stony mountain rises abrupt-{y and symmetrically to a sharp peak. The city is surrounded by mountains, an like the palm of one's hand when the fingers are turned upwards, but this one, Namshan, is the highest, and every night about eight o'clock a beacon blazes for a few minutes from its summit. On some hill top of the west coast, if order reigns, a signal-fire is lighted after sunset every day. Another hill top further north repeat it if all is quiet there too, and so from mountain to mountain the' bonfires travel round the Hermit Land—along the shore of the Yellow Sea, across the frontier of Man. chuns, by Russian Tartary down the Sea of Japan, coasting the Corean Strait, up the Yellow Sea again, and inland to the capital,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.