Outposts of Asia

by Morilla Maria Norton

You can buy in Seoul furniture that is a marvel of luxury and usefulness and the mother of pearl inlaid ornaments and the wonderful brass decorated articles are almost an enthrallment. The American Consulate in Seoul is as rich in its interior beauty of decoration, as in its hospitality. Its mistress is one of the most lovely women of our land, or of any land. There we met the forceful Englishwoman who had tutored the Crown Prince, until he left for Japan; a charming personality whose reminiscences would fill volumes of delightful romance, as she has been in the “inner circle” for years and that, indeed, in a country as full of brilliant scenes and of thrilling events as a drama of the most Victor Hugan sort.

You can buy amber and silk and the wonder of Eastern fabrication and you can exhaust your prose and your purse and your vocabulary over it both, in admiration and exasperation.

Seoul is in part modern, that is, a little modern, and it has a street car line very much like we used to have in Manila in the good old days “before de war.”

I always took it with the thrilling sense of not knowing where I was to land and indeed, altho Seoul looks easy to the traveler, you can get lost as quickly as in Boston. I was lost several times, but found myself again just where I started.

After dark the streets are lighted with huge Chinese lanterns and small Korean lanterns which are carried in the hands and you can follow your neighbor, as you do very gratefully, home this way.

Seoul has a new boulevard since the Japanese occupation and the streets are, oh, marvel of marvels, being cleaned!

Koreans would never have thought of that in all their years of philosophical wandering into the unseen, where they like so much to go!

My trip to Seoul proved to be of more importance than I anticipated, as I had a hole in one of the principal streets filled up, to my great astonishment, again proving that “where there is a will there is a way.” It had threatened for some time to break many hundreds of legs, which passed that way every hour of the day and Stygian night!

Seoul lies in a cup of gigantic hills and it must be not a little like Jerusalem, in situation a “joy of the whole earth.” It has superb moonlight nights and radiant days and it is as majestic and dreamy and sad and glorious as a Greek tragedy.

If you go into the parks of the two ancient palaces and wander for hours and hear the birds sing and watch the tall fading on castle walls and the glory that was Seoul and the grandeur that was Korea and watch thru the trees, arches and bridges of lovely shape and the pagodas richly tinted, where rested the lovely forms of long ago and see the art and the dead, forgotten beauty of an age when beauty was enough, when an emperor sued within those bowers and the days were long and careless and the great lotus flowers now on their stems, as then lulled to sleep all of man’s longings, why you will have to literally tear yourself away, not to want to drop to sleep never to wake up, as you did over the book which told it all, how they lived and dreamed and loved and hated in—Seoul, yes, so long ago when there was a king who had a son beautiful and good and a daughter as fair as the moon, you remember!