The seclusion of girls in the parental home is carried on after marriage, and in the case of women of the upper and middle classes is as complete as is possible. They never go out by daylight except in completely closed chairs. At night, attended by a woman and a servant with a lantern, and with a mantle over her head, a wife may stir abroad and visit her female friends, but never without her husband’s permission, who requires, or may require, proof that the visit has been actually paid. Shopping is done by servants, or goods are brought to the veranda, the vendors discreetly retiring. Time, which among the leisured classes hangs heavily on the hands, is spent in spasmodic cooking, sewing, embroidering, reading very light literature in En-mun, and in the never-failing resources of gossip and the interminable discussion of babies. If a wife is very dull indeed, she can, with her husband’s permission, send for actors, or rather posturing reciters, to the compound, and look at them through the chinks of the bamboo blinds. Through these also many Korean ladies have seen the splendors of the Kur-dong.
When the Korean wife becomes a mother her position is improved. Girls, as being unable to support their parents in old age or to perform the ancestral rites, are not prized as boys are, yet they are neither superfluous nor unwelcome as in some Eastern countries. The birth of a girl is not made an occasion for rejoicing, but that of the firstborn son is, and after the name has been bestowed on him, the mother is known as “the mother of so and so.” The first step alone of the first boy is an occasion for family jubilation. Korean babies have no cradles, and are put to sleep by being tapped lightly on the stomach.
A KOREAN LADY.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] The notes on marriage customs which follow were given me by English-speaking Koreans and were taken down at the time. They apply chiefly to the middle class.
CHAPTER X
THE KOREAN PONY—KOREAN ROADS AND INNS
A gray and murky morning darkening into drizzle, which thickened into a day’s pouring rain, was an inauspicious beginning of a long land journey, but the crawling up the north Han had become monotonous and change and action were desirable. Being an experienced muleteer, I had arranged the loads for each pony so equitably as to obviate the usual quarrel among the mapu or grooms at starting! The men were not regular mapu, and were going chiefly to see the Diamond Mountain. One was well educated and gentlemanly, and the bystanders jeered at them for “loading like scholars.” They were a family party, and there were no disputes.
My first experience of the redoubtable Korean pony was not reassuring. The men had never seen a foreign saddle and were half an hour in getting it “fixed.” Though a pony’s saddle, it was far too large for the creature’s minute body, the girths were half a yard and the crupper nearly a foot too long. The animal bit, squealed, struck with his fore and hind feet, and performed the singular feat of bending his back into such an inward curve that his small body came quite near the ground. The men were afraid of him, and it was only in the brief intervals of fighting that they dared to make a dash at the buckles. It was “tight-lacing” that he objected to.
The Korean pony is among the most salient features of Korea. The breed is peculiar to it. The animals used for burdens are all stallions, from 10 to 12 hands high, well formed, and singularly strong, carrying from 160 to 200 lbs. 30 miles a day, week after week, on sorry food. They are most desperate fighters, squealing and trumpeting on all occasions, attacking every pony they meet on the road, never becoming reconciled to each other even on a long journey, and in their fury ignoring their loads, which are often smashed to pieces. Their savagery makes it necessary to have a mapu for every pony, instead of, as in Persia, one to five. At the inn stables they are not only chained down to the troughs by chains short enough to prevent them from raising their heads, but are partially slung at night to the heavy beams of the roof. Even under these restricted circumstances their cordial hatred finds vent in hyena-like yells, abortive snaps, and attempts to swing their hind legs round. They are never allowed to lie down, and very rarely to drink water, and then only when freely salted. Their nostrils are all slit in an attempt to improve upon Nature and give them better wind. They are fed three times a day on brown slush as hot as they can drink it, composed of beans, chopped millet stalks, rice husks, and bran, with the water in which they have been boiled. The mapu are rough to them, but I never saw them either ill-used or petted. Dearly as I love horses, I was not able on two journeys to make a friend of mine. On this journey I rode a handsome chestnut, only 10 hands high. He walked 4 miles an hour, and in a month of travelling, for much of it over infamous mountain roads, never stumbled, but he resented every attempt at friendliness both with teeth and heels. They are worth from 50s. upwards, and cost little to keep.