The boys in Korea have some very nice toys.  But the best playthings they have are their kites.  They make their kites fight battles in the air, just as the boys do in Japan.  Every boy tries to tear down every other boy’s kite.  This is done by pulling the strings across one another.  Sometimes the sky is full of beautiful kites, which jump and dash about as if they were alive.

The boys also have fine, large pinwheels.  They make these pinwheels whirl around in the wind.  The boys also spin tops, and they play “seesaw,” and jump the rope.

The boys in Korea are fond of fishing.  Nearly every boy has a fishing rod and goes fishing whenever he can.  Sometimes the boys have great fun going around dressed like their fathers.  They wear wooden swords and little bows and arrows like soldiers.  They make straw figures of men, and with their swords they strike off the heads of these straw men.

But the boys have to work as well as play.  Many of the peddlers in Korea are boys.  They sell candy and other things.  The girls do a great deal of work at home.  The first thing they learn to do is to sew.

Would you like to know how the women iron their clothes?  They wrap each piece around a stick and lay it on the floor.  Then they sit down and beat the piece on the stick with wooden clubs.  In this way they make the clothes as smooth as a Chinaman makes the linen which he irons.

[Illustration:  Korean Girls Ironing Clothes.]

The houses in Korea are one or two stories high.  They are made of wood or clay, and sometimes the roofs are of straw.  The windows are high, and the doors are often so low that the people have to stoop down to go in.  The rooms are very small and have hardly any furniture.  There are no chairs.  The people sit on mats on the floor.  The walls between the rooms are made of paper, and the floor is made of stone.

[Illustration:  Korean Houses.]

They have a strange way of heating their houses.  They have no stoves or fireplaces.  But under the floor they have a cellar like an oven.  In this cellar a fire is always kept, and the rooms are sometimes so hot that the people can hardly walk on the stone floors.

People who are poor sleep on mats on the floor.  They sleep in their clothes.  People who are rich have mattresses.  The mattresses are laid on the floor at night, and are taken up in the morning.

The people of Korea eat a great deal of rice.  But they have other kinds of food.  They have meat and fish and eggs and also fruit.  You would think that they would use a great deal of tea, as they live so near China.  But they do not drink tea.  They drink rice water instead.  The rice water is water that rice has been boiled in.

At their meals the men always eat first and the women wait on them.  When the men have eaten as much as they want, then the women and children eat.