ttle
higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a towering
skyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little two-story
studio building on the main street of the city. Practically every
other building is but little higher and not greatly larger as a rule,
than the pens in which our American farmers fatten hogs in the fall.
Most American merchants would expect to make more in a day than the
average white-robed, easy-going Seoul merchant has in stock, but he
smokes his long-stemmed pipe in peaceful contemplation of the world
and doesn't worry. There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course,
although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital of a
kingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city their home;
no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few horses. There are
miserable little overloaded ponies that the average farmer would feel
that he could pitch single-handed into his barn-loft, but the
burden-carriers are mostly bulls that are really magnificent in
appearance, both oxen and ponies carrying loads on their backs that an
American would expect to crush them.

The customs are odd indeed. Men wear enormous straw hats as a badge of
mourning, but the usual style of head-dress is to shave the extreme
summit of the head, while the rest of the hair grows long and is
braided up in a sort of topknot with a little bird-cage hat above it.
This hat is then tied under the chin as an American woman would tie
hers.

Girls are but little seen on the streets, custom requiring them to
stay indoors before marriage, and the married women, when on the
street are likely to wear a sort of green wrap thrown over their heads
and shoulders that leaves only their eyes and contiguous facial
territory exposed. The tourist is at first {63} inclined to think that
there are many young girls on the streets, but this is because the
boys dress as we have grown used to seeing girls dress in America.
Take the young boy who waits on my table: fair of feature in his neat
white dress, and with a long glossy hair-plait hanging down his back,
you would think him some fair Korean maiden. When he gets married a
little later, probably at seventeen or eighteen, he will shave his
head (not necessarily as a sign of mourning!) and wear his hair
thereafter in the manner described in the preceding paragraph. An
English missionary-doctor's pretty daughter here yesterday (and how
pretty an English or American girl does look i