the country, and at the same time hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of the stuff was turned out in Japan and brought over to Korea. This was a great injury to Koreans and also to legitimate Japanese trade, for the nickels fell and fell, until at one time they were at a discount of one hundred and fifty per cent. Both the Korean and Japanese governments made strenuous efforts to put a stop to this demoralisation, but so long as the Korean government continued to put out coins with a face value of five cents, and an intrinsic value of only one and a half cents, they found it impossible to compete with the counterfeiters, and the two went along side by side until a dozen or so of the latter were executed, and then it became too serious a matter, and the counterfeiters suspended operations.
Only the oldest foreign residents of Seoul will remember the great mat sheds which were erected from time to time and in which the old-time cash was minted. The smelting furnaces were mere holes in the ground, and the naked operatives stood astride of the glowing orifices and reached down with long tongues and seized the edges of the crucibles that held the molten metal. At night, when there was no other light but that which escaped from the furnace mouths and lit the rough interior of the shed with a livid, greenish glow, it was a picture straight from Dante's Inferno. The metal was poured into moulds which contained some fifty impressions of the pattern, and when the casting came out it looked like rough lace, the coins all being connected by narrow bars of metal. These were broken up, and the coins were strung on square metal rods that just fitted the hole in the coin. The ends of this rod were then put in a rude vice, and men with enormous coarse files ground down the edges of a thousand or more of the coins at a time. It was exceedingly rough work, and it was done just as cheaply as it could be done and still pass the very superficial examination that it would be subjected to. After having their edges filed, the coins were dumped into a shallow trough set in the ground, and sand and water were added. Two men sat down
