15th May.
Tue fourth number of the first volume of the "Korea Review," published at Seoul, and edited by the Rey. Homer B. Hulbert of the Royal Normal School at Seoul, contains a great deal of very interesting letterpress. The review itself is very well printed, and got up in a very handy form, and the price, four dollars a year for the twelve numbers including postage, is extremely moderate. This issue opens with the opening instalment of a Corean romance entitled "A Vagary of Fortune," by a writer who signs himself © Narro." From the stories and folk lore that foreign residents have translated and given to the world, we have long known that a great deal of romance and tradition still remains in the country, handed down from the time when the civilisation of Corea was almost equal to that of China and ahead of that of Japan. It is curious that in the lapse of years the three civilisations should have had such different fates. Japan has advanced, China has romained stationary, and Corea has notably gone back. We are not told, and we may be wrong in presuming, that this story, "A Vagary of Fortune," is a translation from the Corean; but it has all the appearance of being indigenous, it has a remarkably ingenious plot, and is admirably told.. The local colour is strongly painted in the opening page Your son will die on his eighteenth birthday precisely at noon Three men were standing on a ledge of rock high up on a mountain side in ccntral Corea. Behind them, builé into the side of the cliff, half cave and half hut, was the home of a holy recluse. Before them the sun was sinking to rest behind a serrated line of mountain peaks that formed the western horizon; but the thoughts of these three men were-neither on the hut behind nor on the scene before them. The most striking figure of the three was that of the hermit whose long scanty beard exaggerated the thinness of is face and whose eye, lit by the true a fire, showed the power of mind to out-live matter.
The second figure was that of a highborn Corean, somewhat past middle age, dressed in the flowing robes that make the Corean gentleman the most dignified of all the dwellers in the Far East." The imseriousness of his mien and of his eye showed a man born to command. He was, in sooth, the Prime Minister of Corea. Beside him stood his only son, Sun Chang-i, a boy of fifteen years.
"Your son will die on birthday precisely at noon, The Prime Minister had not been able to withstand the temptation to look into the future and assure himself of the boy's success in life and this doom had been pronounced not by an ordinary fortune-teller, or madang, but by the saintliest hermit in the land.
The son referred to meets accidentally, falls in love with, and. mar-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.