PC_256_Poe_1910_1911_Typescript_024

there must have been a hundred with absolutely primitive
arrangements for carrying luggage on their backs--twin pieces
of sapling with protruding parallel limbs forming a sort of shelf
for my suit-case.

I am glad to get to Korea. In Japan proper nearly
all the work of breaking, cultivating and harvesting was done
by hand, there were almost no horses, oxen or cattle to be
seen, and absolutely no sheep or hogs; and it is astonishing
to find how much one misses the familiar sights of the farms
at home. Rice fields, one-story shops, Shinto Toriis and Budd-
hist temples are well enough; but before you know it; you
are hungry for the sight of fields with horses or oxen doing
the work, hungry even for the sight of an old razor-back piney
woods rooter, or a field of opening cotton. All these Korea
has supplied--even if I do feel on the whole that I have been
transported back into the times of Abraham. Certainly there
is little in Korean farm life as I have seen it that would not
look familiar to the ancient patriarch of Israel if he should
make a tour of inspection today. Only oxen are used--no horses.
The plows are wooden and are made by hand from ^(nearby) trees cut in
the near-by forests, with only a primitive point of iron or
steel, and there are not two handles as with us, but only
one and that little better than a stick of fo^(i)re-wood. The
houses are equally primitive--mere walls of stone and mortar
about as high as your head, with straw roofs above them. In
nearly every group of these houses are two or three with pump-
kin vines clamboring over the roof, and at least one housetop