Forty long years of persecution followed, for Chong Mong-ju’s hatred of the Lady Om and me was deathless.  Worse luck, he was favoured with long life as well as were we cursed with it.  I have said the Lady Om was a wonder of a woman.  Beyond endlessly repeating that statement, words fail me, with which to give her just appreciation.  Somewhere I have heard that a great lady once said to her lover:  “A tent and a crust of bread with you.”  In effect that is what the Lady Om said to me.  More than to say it, she lived the last letter of it, when more often than not crusts were not plentiful and the sky itself was our tent.

Every effort I made to escape beggary was in the end frustrated by Chong Mong-ju.  In Songdo I became a fuel-carrier, and the Lady Om and I shared a hut that was vastly more comfortable than the open road in bitter winter weather.  But Chong Mong-ju found me out, and I was beaten and planked and put out upon the road.  That was a terrible winter, the winter poor “What-Now” Vandervoot froze to death on the streets of Keijo.

In Pyeng-yang I became a water-carrier, for know that that old city, whose walls were ancient even in the time of David, was considered by the people to be a canoe, and that, therefore, to sink a well inside the walls would be to scupper the city.  So all day long thousands of coolies, water-jars yoked to their shoulders, tramp out the river gate and back.  I became one of these, until Chong Mong-ju sought me out, and I was beaten and planked and set upon the highway.

Ever it was the same.  In far Wiju I became a dog-butcher, killing the brutes publicly before my open stall, cutting and hanging the caresses for sale, tanning the hides under the filth of the feet of the passers-by by spreading the hides, raw-side up, in the muck of the street.  But Chong Mong-ju found me out.  I was a dyer’s helper in Pyonhan, a gold-miner in the placers of Kang-wun, a rope-maker and twine-twister in Chiksan.  I plaited straw hats in Padok, gathered grass in Whang-hai, and in Masenpo sold myself to a rice farmer to toil bent double in the flooded paddies for less than a coolie’s pay.  But there was never a time or place that the long arm of Chong Mong-ju did not reach out and punish and thrust me upon the beggar’s way.

The Lady Om and I searched two seasons and found a single root of the wild mountain ginseng, which is esteemed so rare and precious a thing by the doctors that the Lady Om and I could have lived a year in comfort from the sale of our one root.  But in the selling of it I was apprehended, the root confiscated, and I was better beaten and longer planked than ordinarily.