is out for a constitutional, and that we may safely say is not a privilege to be envied.  The poor thing has no name, and when she is born she goes by the vague denomination of “So-and-so’s” daughter.  When there are several girls in the family, to avoid confusion, surnames are found convenient enough, but they are again lost the moment she marries, which, as we shall see in another chapter, often happens at a very early age.  She then becomes “So-and-so’s” wife.  The woman in Corea has somewhat of a sad and dull life, for from the age of four or five she is separated even from her brothers and brought up in a separate portion of the house, and from that time ideas are pounded into her poor little head as to the disgrace of talking, or even being looked at by humans of a different gender.  The higher classes, of course, suffer most from the enforcement of this strict etiquette, for in the very lowest grades of society the woman enjoys comparative freedom.  She can talk to men as much as she pleases, and even goes out unveiled, being much too low a being to be taken any notice of; the upper classes, however, are very punctilious as to the observance of their severe rules.  The Corean woman is a slave.  She is used for pleasure and work.  She can neither speak nor make any observations, and never is she allowed to see any man other than her husband.  She has the right of the road in the streets, and the men are courteous to her.  Not only do the men make room for her to pass, but even turn their faces aside so as not to gaze at her.  There are numberless stories of a tragic character in Corean literature, of lovely maidens that have committed suicide, or have been murdered by their husbands, brothers, or fathers, only for having been seen by men, and even to the present day a husband would be considered quite justified in the eye of the law if he were to kill his wife for the great sin of having spoken to another man but himself!  A widow of the upper class is not allowed to re-marry, and if she claims any pretence of having loved her late husband, she ought to try to follow him to the other world at the earliest convenience by committing the jamun, a simple performance by which the devoted wife is only expected to cut her throat or rip her body open with a sharp sword.  They say that it is a mere nothing, when you know how to do it, but it always struck me, that practising a little game of that sort would not be an easy matter.  For the sake of truth, I must confess that it was a husband who depreciated the worthy act.  The lower people are infinitely more sensible.  Though a woman of this class were to lose twenty husbands, she would never for a moment think of doing away with herself, but would soon enter into her twenty-first matrimonial alliance.