and naked, dragged for herring and sprat while their children gathered crabs, diving after their victims in the deep pools with screams of delight.
Around the hovels, in all these clusters of small villages by the waves, men slept in the blazing sunshine. While their lords reposed, the women mended the rents in the nets, or busied themselves in constructing crude traps, with the aid of which their husbands contrived to catch fish. The aspect of these villages upon the beach was not inviting; and they did not compare favourably with any of the inland villages through which we had passed. They were dirty, tumble-down, and untidy; the appearance of the people suggested great personal uncleanliness. The air was laden with the smell of fish drying in the sun—of itself a pleasant perfume, smacking of the salt of the sea—but here so mingled with the odours of decaying offal, piles of rubbish, and varieties of fish and seaweed in different stages of decomposition that the condensed effluvium was sickening. The people, however, were neither curious nor unkindly; for the great part they were indifferent, offering baskets of fresh eggs, fish, and chickens readily for sale. The beach by these villages was black with rows of fish, drying, upon the white sand, in the most primitive fashion. The art of smoking fish is unknown, and the careless manner in which the curing is done proves that the treatment has neither principle nor system. Dogs lay upon these rows of fish, fowls fed undisturbed off them, and, in many places, men slept peacefully with a number of them heaped together, to serve as pillows for their weary heads. Where such neglect prevails, it is perhaps not unnatural that much of the disease among the Koreans should be attributed to the dried fish which they eat so greedily.
