only a second-rate official position, you may depend upon it you will see
airs! One hardly ventures to address any such personage, for so grand is
he that, he will hardly condescend to say "How do you do?" to you, for
fear of lowering himself. There are only about four cats in the place,
and their sole subject of conversation is precedence and breaches of
etiquette, when you would imagine that in such a distant land, and away,
so to speak, from the outer world, they would all be like brothers.

You must now consider yourselves as fairly landed in Corea, and having
tried to describe to you what things and people that are not Corean are
like in Corea, I must provide you--again of course only
figuratively--with a tiny little pony, the smallest probably you have
ever seen, that you may follow me to the capital of the kingdom, which I
am sure will be interesting to you as being thoroughly characteristic of
the country. First of all, however, we had better make sure of one point.

The name Corea, or _K_orea, you may as well forget or discard as useless,
for to the Corean mind the word would not convey any definite idea. Not
even would he look upon it as the name of his country. The real native
name now used is Cho-sen, though occasionally in the vernacular the
kingdom goes by the name of Gori, or the antiquated Korai. There is no
doubt that the origin of the word Corea is Korai, which is an
abbreviation of Ko-Korai, a small kingdom in the mountainous region of
the Ever White Mountains, and bordering upon the kingdom of Fuyu, a
little further north, whence the brave and warlike people probably
descended, who conquered old Cho-sen. The authorities on Corean history,
basing their arguments on Chinese writings, claim that the present people
of Cho-sen are the true descendants of the Fuyu race, and that the
kingdom of Ko-Korai lay between Fuyu on the northern side and Cho-sen on
the southern, from the former of which a few families migrated towards