generally an exception among this type, while among the lower
classes, the black ones, it is almost a chief characteristic. The
cheek-bones are prominent. The hair is scanty on the cheeks, chin, and
over and under the lips, but quite luxuriant on the head. There is a very
curious custom in Corea as to how you should wear your hair, and a great
deal of importance is attached to the custom. If by chance you are a
bachelor--and if you are, you must put up with being looked down upon by
everybody in Corea--you have to let your hair grow long, part it
carefully in the middle of your skull, and have it made up into a thick
tress at the back of your head, which arrangement marks you out as a
single man and an object of sport, for in the Land of the Morning Calm it
seems that you can only be a bachelor under the two very circumstances
under which we, in our land of all-day restlessness, generally marry,
viz., if you are a fool and if you have not a penny to live upon! When
thus unhappily placed you rank, according to Corean ideas, as a child, no
matter what your age is, and you dress as a child, being even allowed to
wear coloured coats when the country is in mourning, as it was, when I
visited it, for the death of the dowager-Queen Regent, and everybody is
compelled to wear white, an order that if not quickly obeyed by a married
man means probably to him the loss of his head. Thus, though looked down
upon as outcasts and wretches, bachelors none the less do enjoy some
privileges out there. Here is yet another one. They never wear a hat;
another exemption to be taken into consideration when you will see, a
little further on, what a Corean hat is like.

[Illustration: THE "TOP-KNOT" OF THE MARRIED MEN]

Married men, on the other hand--and ninety-nine per hundred are married
in Cho-sen--wear their hair done up in a most wonderful fashion. It is
not as long as that of bachelors, for it is cut. It is combed, with the
head down, in the orthodox fashion, as women do, I suppose, when they
comb it by themselves, and then passing the left hand under it, along the
forehead, it is caught close to the head just about the middle of the
skull. This being satisfactorily done, what remains of the hair above the
hand is twisted round into the shape and size of a sausage, which then
remains sticking up perpendicularly on the top of the head, and which, in
the natural order of things, goes by the sensible name of top-knot.
Occasionally a little