Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/36

still on the sides of hills. The last is a smaller and harder variety, and is much used in stocking military granaries, for it will last eight or ten years without spoiling. The great enemies of rice are drought, flood, worms, locusts, blight and wind. The extreme difficulty of keeping paddy-fields in order in such a hilly country, the absolute necessity of having rains at a particular time and of not having it at others, the great labour of transplanting and constant cultivation, all these things conspire to make the production of rice an incubus upon the Korean people. Ask a Louisiana rice-planter how he would like to cultivate the cereal in West Virginia, and you will discover what it means in Korea. But in spite of all the difficulties, the Korean clings to his favourite dish, and out of a hundred men who have saved up a little money ninety-nine will buy rice-fields as being the safest investment. Korean poetry teems with allusions to this seemingly prosaic cereal. The following is a free translation of a poem referring to the different species of rice:

The earth, the fresh warm earth, by heaven's decree,
Was measured out, mile beyond mile afar;
The smiling face which Chosun first upturned
Toward the o'er-arching sky is dimpled still
With that same smile; and nature's kindly law,
In its unchangeability, rebukes
The fickle fashions of the thing called Man.
The mountain grain retains its ancient shape,
Long-waisted, hard and firm; the rock-ribbed hills,
On which it grows, both form and fibre yield.
The lowland grain still sucks the fatness up
From the rich fen, and delves for gold wherewith
To deck itself for Autumn's carnival.
Alas for that rude swain who nothing recks
Of nature's law, and casts his seedling grain
Or here or there regardless of its kind.
For him the teeming furrow gapes in vain
And dowers his granaries with emptiness.
To north and south the furrowed mountains stretch,
A wolf gigantic, crouching to his rest.
To east and west the streams, like serpents lithe,
Glide down to seek a home beneath the sea.