mongst the Koreans for several months,
and then, one fine day, cross over the Yalu into Manchuria. It would be
of exceptional advantage to the correctness of appreciation did he cross
over the Yalu on the heels of a hostile and alien army.

War is to-day the final arbiter in the affairs of men, and it is as yet
the final test of the worth-whileness of peoples. Tested thus, the
Korean fails. He lacks the nerve to remain when a strange army crosses
his land. The few goods and chattels he may have managed to accumulate
he puts on his back, along with his doors and windows, and away he heads
for his mountain fastnesses. Later he may return, sans goods, chattels,
doors, and windows, impelled by insatiable curiosity for a "look see."
But it is curiosity merely--a timid, deerlike curiosity. He is prepared
to bound away on his long legs at the first hint of danger or trouble.

Northern Korea was a desolate land when the Japanese passed through.
Villages and towns were deserted. The fields lay untouched. There was
no ploughing nor sowing, no green things growing. Little or nothing was
to be purchased. One carried one's own food with him and food for horses
and servants was the anxious problem that waited at the day's end. In
many a lonely village not an ounce nor a grain of anything could be
bought, and yet there might be standing around scores of white-garmented,
stalwart Koreans, smoking yard-long pipes and chattering,
chattering--ceaselessly chattering. Love, money, or force could not
procure from them a horseshoe or a horseshoe nail.

"Upso," was their invariable reply. "Upso," cursed word, which means
"Have not got."

They had tramped probably forty miles that day, down from their
hiding-places, just for a "look see," and forty miles back they would
cheerfully tramp, chattering all the way over what they had seen. Shake
a stick at them as they stand chattering about your camp-fire, and the
gloom of the landscape will be filled with tall, flitting ghosts,
bounding like deer, with great springy strides which one cannot but envy.
They have splendid vigour and fine bodies, but they are accustomed to
being beaten and robbed without protest or resistance by every chance
foreigner who enters their country.

From this nerveless, forsaken Korean land I rode down upon the sandy
islands of the Yalu. For weeks these islands had been the dread
between-the-lines of two fighting armies. The air above had been rent by