.S. "Flying Fish" hove in sight,
on board which they were kindly received, and brought to Nagasaki.

These stirring events have actually occurred whilst we have been lying
quietly at anchor, in Gen San and Chosan. Under such a state of affairs,
who shall predict the fate of Admiral Willes' treaty?

I trust I may be pardoned for being thus prolix; but surely, we who are
actually on the scene of events ought not to be more ignorant of what is
going on in our immediate neighbourhood than our friends who are so many
thousands of miles removed from it.

I cannot say much of the Coreans, for, in the first place, the usual
sources of information are almost silent on the subject, there being
about only one reliable English work on Corea; and secondly we have no
means, had we the desire, to study this people, who are so jealous of
their women that they wont allow you to approach within a mile of their
dwellings. On one occasion I remember I sought, for the purposes of this
present narrative, to set aside this prohibition, and feigning ignorance
of it I penetrated to the outskirts of a village, when half-a-dozen big
fellows rushing up to me, and gesticulating, I thought it advisable to
"boom off." However, I saw what I had ventured thus far to see,
notwithstanding--one of their women; but I am afraid an ugly specimen of
the sex. So far does this feeling prevail that they would not permit
even our admiral's lady to satisfy a woman's curiosity about women;
though the chief of the village did condescend to allow her to sit
beside him on his mat, and even went so far as to offer her a _smoke of
his pipe_.

One of the accounts of their origin is peculiar. A certain beautiful
goddess once descended from the celestial regions and sojourned in
Corea. But it would appear that she left her hat behind, for shortly
after arrival she received a sun-stroke, which caused her to lay an egg
of abnormal size, out of which there stepped--minerva-like--a full blown
Corean of gigantic stature. This young fellow, in one of his incursions
into the mountains, one day returned to his mamma with a beautiful
white-skinned maid whom he had picked up in a fairy bower. His mother
was not at all pleased--so the story goes--with this maid of earth, and
made it so hot for her that in a fit of rage the son, whom she had
hatched with such tender solicitude, slew her. Remorseful at the deed,
he swore that henceforth a similar misfortune should never again occur