There is not the least doubt that, though to the casual observer the majority of Coreans appear depressed and unintelligent, they are, as a matter of fact, far from stupid.  I have met people in the land of Cho-sen, whose cleverness would have been conspicuous in any country, Western or otherwise.  When they set their mind to learn something they never cease till their object is attained, and I can vouch for their quick comprehension, even of matters of which they have never before heard.  Languages seem to come easy to them, and their pronunciation of foreign tongues is infinitely better than that of their neighbours, the Chinese and the Japanese.  The only stumbling block is the letter “f,” which they pronounce as a “p.”  I can give an instance of a Mr. Chang, the son of a noble, who was appointed by the king to be official interpreter to Mr. C.R.  Greathouse.  In less than two months, this youth of nineteen mastered enough English to enable him both to understand it and converse in it.  I have seen him learn by heart out of a dictionary as many as two hundred English words in a day, and what is more, remember every one of them, including the spelling.  Only once did I hear him make a comical mistake.  He had not quite grasped the meaning of the word “twin”; for, in answer to a question I put to him, “Yes, sir,” said he, boisterously, proud apparently of the command he had attained over his latest language, “Yes, sir, I have a twin brother who is three years older than myself.”

The Corean magistrates think that to over-educate the lower classes is a mistake, which must end in great unhappiness.

“If you are educated like a gentleman, you must be able to live like a gentleman,” wisely said a Corean noble to me.  “If you acquire an education which you cannot live up to, you are only made wretched, and your education makes you feel all the more keenly the miseries of human life.  Besides, with very few exceptions, as one is born an artist, or a poet, one has to be born a gentleman to be one.  All the education in the world may make you a nice man, but not a noble in the strict sense of the word.”

Partly, in consequence of habits of thought like this, and partly, because it answers to leave the public in ignorance, superstition, which is one of the great evils in the country, is rather encouraged.  Not alone the lower classes, but the whole people, including nobles and the King himself, suffer by it.  It is a remarkable fact, that, a people who in many ways are extremely open-minded, and more philosophic than the general run of human beings, can allow themselves to be hampered in this way by such absurd notions as spirits and their evil ways.

A royal palace, different to, but not very far from, the one described in the previous chapter, was abandoned not very long ago for the simple reason that it was haunted.  Thus, there are no less than two palaces in the capital, that have been built at great expense, but deserted in order to evade the visits of those most tiresome impalpable individuals, “the Ghosts.”  One of these haunted abodes we have inspected, with its tumble-down buildings; the other I will now describe.