The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-04-05
sEOUL's STREETS.
They're Interesting in a Way, but
 Not Cheerful.

Great, spreading expanses of waste , space, lying flat between rows of sin
 gled-storied mud-and- straw huts, fo the most part, they took as if they ha grown into the street by simple chanc
 and without ever having had a humal
 thought bestowed upon them Irregu
 lar spaces, between rows upon rows o
 houses, they are only the passing
 places for the multitude, and, beinl
 common property, they are commonl.
 neglected.
 The passing of the multitude is prob
 ably thought by some to add q toucl
 of brightness to the otherwise unhapp!
 scene, but to me there could be nothing
 more depressing than the dull white O
 the nations costume, unrelieved, as i
 is, by anything but dirt, It is the ugli
 est costume of the world When tn,
 nation is not in mourning there is re. lief in the little black, beehive hat on almost every male head in the king.
 dom; but since a period of mourning
 lasts so long, it doesn't often happeI
 that the stiff, white buekram hats art laid aside But the white hats are mol
 the worst of it. There is $ fabby flop. flop of wide, white cotton trousers, and
 there is an ample white cotton coat blowing disconsolately in the wind fail to see how the costume of Korea brlghtens it's general aspects any, but there are people who have written that | it is narticularly cheerful
 The street of Korea are used for ev- cry conceivable thing. Down the mid dle of them, or either side, the city's sewage reeks along a sluggish course carrying with it, as have said before every possible thing but it's own hor- rible odor. The houses on the main streets, or what | D ght, for want of a more descriptive name, be called the business streets, are all built with one stde open, as houses are built in Japan There is little or nothing displayed for sale in any shops, and there is seldom anything to detain a iloiterer along the way The Korean woman knows ab- solutely nothing about the joys and i sorrows of shopping. She lives her life in virtuous seclusion, or at least in se- clusion, and the tradesmen must needs so to her and thrust their goods re- spectfully through small opening in the door of her apartments. What she doesn't want she thrusts out again and then haggles with him over the price of what she has selected, with the thin, transparent, partition be- Etween them. So there Is little need for lattractiye shop windows. Since the women make all the mems clothes they, of course, buy the materials for them also I have really never seen Ianything purchased in a shop. But still they built with the uselessly open side, and one can buy if one is so inclined, as foreigners so often are. The houses that are not of this description are not to be seen at all, being hidden behind expressionless stone walls capped with 1 tiles and pierced with the tiniest possl- ble gateways.
 l It doesn't sound particularly attrac- tive, does it? Nothing in the picture to lure one out on a sightseeing ex- petition, and yet the street of the cities, and of Seoul especially, are all ways full of people. Everybody seems to be going somewhere, too, but good ness knows where. Where is there to go? In Japan there are parks, picnic places, music-halls, theaters, wrestling matches, temple bazaars, attractive street full of most fascinating things, | thousands of gay, pretty girls Hitting laround on little clonking wooden shoes, thousands of happy children playing in the streets There are temples and pal aces. beautiful gardens and quaint tea houses, It isn't hard to understand that the hurrying multitudes in Tokio are going somewhere; that each men and woman has mo object, But in See Eoul? There are no parks, no music halls, no the@ers, no temple bazaars, no temples. no attractive, curio shops, no attractive curios to keep in shops, no gay, pretty girls no clonking wood en shoes, no beautiful palaces, no gar- dens no anything to attract pleasure seeking crowd, and that is why one wonders at throng, "Whither goest thou?" They shog-shog along in soft straw shoes that make all to little noise, and one welcomes even the sound of Q rickety 'rillsha. The people walk in any part of the streets because they have no vehicle than this to fear and only few of these have been imported from China and Japan. The only other thing in the form of vehicle that I I,, oil belonging to foreign employee of the electric company, and when 1t passed peaceably and rather carefully through the by no means smooth throughfares the people would scatter on either side like frightened chickens, then gaze af- ter it as long as it was in sight. I longed for an automobile.
 Some enterprising Americans have put an electric street railway in Seoul and given to several of the streets and amusing modern appearance, but the Koreans have learned that the big cars run on tracks, so they are no long CT afraid of them. A member of the railway company told me, however that they had to kill several Koreans before they arrived at this gratifying result. The people thought at first that he cars were run by some new and terrible kind of demon, and they per formed all manner of didos to rid them selves of him; but they innocently got hold of live wires a number of times and learned that the demon was pow erful and could kill as no other demon but the demon of lightning could. so