larger cities, but in the country they are more difficult to obtain. Most well-to-do gentlemen keep their own private chairs. In travelling long distances you pay each carrier a stated sum for each ten li of the road. The four-man chairs are used only by the highest officials. No one of lesser degree than a cabinet minister is allowed to use them. They are much like the twoman chair, but the poles are longer, and the cords that hold the poles at either end are attached to a short stick that rests upon the shoulders of the two bearers. I have never found a method of conveyance more smooth or delightful than this four-man chair. The coolies do not keep step, and so the motion is perfectly even. The elasticity of the poles add to this effect, and no railway car was ever built luxuriously enough nor were rails ever laid true enough to equal this delightful motion. In no department of Korean life is the wonderful endurance of the Korean more fully illustrated than in the carrying of these chairs. If you were in a hurry to go overland from Seoul to Pyeng-yang, a distance of about one hundred and sixty miles, you would naturally suppose that a good horse would take you there in the quickest time, but there is probably no horse in Korea that would get you to your destination so quickly as the chair coolie. Take eight men and pay them well and you will enter Pyeng-yang about noon of the third day out from Seoul. They will take you four miles an hour, sixteen hours a day. The amount of rice they will consume en route is enormous, and they will sleep for twentyfour hours after reaching the end of the journey.
Another way of travelling is by horseback or donkey-back. Though the Korean horse is very small, no Korean would think of riding it and sending his baggage by some other conveyance. Two stout baskets or boxes containing the rider's effects are slung over the back of the horse and rest against his sides. On top of this the traveller's blankets and other bedding are smoothly laid. Then a sort of frame, like the back of a chair but only eight inches high, is placed on top of all, and there the man sits crosslegged or with his feet hanging down. You stand aghast at the
