It was the first diplomatic mission from the hermit kingdom to any Western power, and they wanted someone with savoir faire to look after them. He accepted the post, landing in San Francisco with his charges on September 2nd, and crossing to New York, where the Embassy was received by President Arthur. After spending six weeks in the United States he returned by the Pacific with the greater part of his colleagues, reaching Japan in November. They felt grateful for what he had done, and he was invited to go on with them to Korea as the guest of the King—a chance not to be lost, so he went, and after sundry wearisome delays in transit came to SÖul, the capital of the Kingdom, just before Christmas, 1883.

Evidently he had not intended so long a sojourn and study as he was destined to make, for in a letter to his mother on December the 20th, just after landing at Chemulpo, the port of SÖul, he writes: “I purpose to study the land a little and then return overland either to Pusan” (the Japanese treaty port at the extreme southern end of the peninsula) “or after some travelling in the interior here, Gensan.” He had as yet no idea of the impossibility of travel in Korea in the winter, especially for an occidental, but he learned it the following day when with much discomfort he went half way to SÖul, the whole distance from the port to the capital being twenty-seven miles. Another and stronger reason for his prolonged stay was the hospitality tendered and the solicitude for his comfort. At Nagasaki, where the ship stopped on the journey from Japan, his Korean colleagues, observing his preference, engaged a Japanese familiar with European cooking to become a member of his household, and they brought along also chairs for his use. In the letter to his mother just quoted he writes; “I think I shall either take a house of my own or, perhaps better, have a part of a Corean’s to my exclusive use.... I shall of course be asked to stay at our minister Foote’s, but I shall fight shy of it in order to be less tied politically.[2] You see there are national parties even in this small state, and I think it best for me to be, at any rate at first, on the cross benches. Out in the Far East the ministers of foreign countries are always mixed up in national politics, and Corea is no exception to the rule.” A shrewd observation in view of the fact that hardly a year passed before there was bloodshed between the adherents of China and Japan in the government, when the Japanese legation was attacked and fought its way to the sea.

He found that there had been prepared for him a house, or rather group of buildings forming a part of the Foreign Office, of which he was formally a member as having been Counsellor to the Embassy to America. “From the street,” he writes, “you enter a courtyard, then another, then a garden, and so on, wall after wall, until you have left the outside world far behind and are in a labyrinth of your own. Before you lies a garden; behind another surrounded by porticoes. Courtyards, gardens, porticoes, rooms, corridors in endless succession until you lose yourself in the delightful maze.” He speaks of the painting of landscapes on the walls, of a door cut out as a circle in the wall into which fit two sliding panels beautifully painted on both sides. “Floor, ceiling, walls all are paper. But you would hardly imagine that what you tread upon, to all appearance square stone slabs, is oil paper so hard as even in sounds under your footfalls to resemble flags.... Through the thick sliding windows sifts the golden light into the room, and for the nonce you forget that outside is the dull grey of a cloudy sky and a snow decked land of a December afternoon.”

There he spent the winter under strangely favorable conditions; one of the first men of European race to enter the country with an official position and no official duties or restraints, and a couple of officers detailed to care for him, without hampering him by constant attendance on his movements. In fact he seems to have been more free than anyone in the land. It was beneath the dignity of a higher official to go through the streets except in a palanquin; and all others, save blind men, must not be out of their houses after night-fall on pain of flogging. But finding that to be carried squatting on the cold floor of a box two and a half feet square was intolerable, he took to his feet; and, being an official, he walked all over the city at any hour of the day or night, without this foreign eccentricity shocking either the high or the lowly. He was received in special audience by the King and the Crown Prince, and later photographed them; was visited and entertained abundantly, made many acquaintances and some warm friends. On February 2nd, he wrote to his mother: “I think it will please your maternal ear to hear of the esteem in which your boy is held and of the honors and great kindness which are lavished upon him. On New Year’s Eve[3] he received some gifts from the King, made on purpose for him, a description of which you will find in a letter to Katie. They were accompanied by the wish on the part of His Majesty ‘that in view of my speedy return, he hoped that I would come back next year.’ I had informed them of my departure before long, which they do not view favorably. I was also told that I was constantly in the King’s thoughts. He is hospitality and kindness itself to everyone. I have seen several houses of the highest nobles in the land and there is none to compare with the establishment they have given me. I have been consulted on foreign business, my requests for others granted, talked to on home matters, in short I am looked upon as a friend of the government and cared for in corresponding style.”

Delightful as the experience was, there came over him in time a desire to go back to more familiar surroundings, and as spring approached he spoke of his intention. They tried to dissuade him, and did induce him to delay his departure; but at last he sailed with no little feeling of sadness in leaving a country where he had been so kindly treated and which he was never to see again. In a letter to his sister Bessie, on February 17, not long before his departure he wrote: “I have already taken fifty-three negatives of scenes in and about SÖul, groups and individuals. I am not only expected by the Coreans but urged to write a book; but as I have a wholesome dread of publication I reserve my decision. I am to send as a present to His Majesty a collection of my photographs printed in Japan on my return.”