situation become at last, that the King was obliged to order that all the coast villages be moved inland ten miles, so that the marauders should find nothing to loot. This was done, and it is said that it is for this reason that the coast of Korea looks so barren and uninhabited even to this day.
Several of the kings took Mongol princesses for their wives, and these women, imitating the example of Jezebel, made themselves unmitigated nuisances. They knew they had behind them the Mongol emperors, and their lawless freaks and escapades scandalised the people. The magnificent marble pagoda that stands in the centre of Seoul to-day was a gift from one of the Mongol emperors to his daughter, the Queen of Koryu. The intention was to erect it at Songdo, the capital; but when it came from China by boat, it was found too heavy to carry overland to that town; so it was brought up the Han River and erected in Han-yang, the present Seoul.
It is a curious fact that the Mongols still held the island of Quelpart, and used it as a breeding-place for horses; and when the fall of the Mongol power became imminent, and the last Emperor saw that he was to be driven from his capital, he determined to make this island his asylum, and sent an enormous amount of treasure there for his future use. Such at least is the statement found in the Korean annals. When the time came, however, he was unable to make good his escape in this direction, but had to flee northward.
As the fourteenth century neared its close, there were two men in Korea worthy of note. One was a monk named Sindon, who was, so far as we can learn, a Korean counterpart of Arbaces in Bulwer Lytton's greatest novel. He had the King completely under his thumb, or "in his sleeve," as Koreans would say. There was no heir apparent to the throne, and the baseness of the King was so abject that this Sindon made him take to wife a concubine of his own, who was already pregnant by him, hoping thus to see his own son on the throne. The enormities of this man exceed belief and cannot be transcribed. He was
