BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE
His breakfast and the talk over it with Penzance seemed good things.It suddenly had become worth while to discuss the approaching hop harvest and the yearly influx of the hop pickers from London.Yesterday the subject had appeared discouraging enough.The great hop gardens of the estate had been in times past its most prolific source of agricultural revenue and the boast and wonder of the hop-growing county.
The neglect and scant food of the lean years had cost them their reputation.Each season they had needed smaller bands of "hoppers," and their standard had been lowered.It had been his habit to think of them gloomily, as of hopeless and irretrievable loss.Because this morning, for a remote reason, the pulse of life beat strong in him he was taking a new view.
Might not study of the subject, constant attention and the application of all available resource to one end produce appreciable results? The idea presented itself in the form of a thing worth thinking of.
"It would provide an outlook and give one work to do," he put it to his companion."To have a roof over one's head, a sound body, and work to do, is not so bad.Such things form the whole of G.Selden's cheerful aim.His spirit is alight within me.I will walk over and talk to Bolter."Bolter was a farmer whose struggle to make ends meet was almost too much for him.Holdings whose owners, either through neglect or lack of money, have failed to do their duty as landlords in the matter of repairs of farmhouses, outbuildings, fences, and other things, gradually fall into poor hands.Resourceful and prosperous farmers do not care to hold lands under unprosperous landlords.There were farms lying vacant on the Mount Dunstan estate, there were others whose tenants were uncertain rent payers or slipshod workers or dishonest in small ways.Waste or sale of the fertiliser which should have been given to the soil as its due, neglect in the case of things whose decay meant depreciation of property and expense to the landlord, were dishonesties.But Mount Dunstan knew that if he turned out Thorn and Fittle, whom no watching could wholly frustrate in their tricks, Under Mount Farm and Oakfield Rise would stand empty for many a year.But for his poverty Bolter would have been a good tenant enough.He was in trouble now because, though his hops promised well, he faced difficulties in the matter of "pickers." Last year he had not been able to pay satisfactory prices in return for labour, and as a result the prospect of securing good workers was an unpromising one.
The hordes of men, women, and children who flock year after year to the hop-growing districts know each other.They learn also which may be called the good neighbourhoods and which the bad; the gardens whose holders are considered satisfactory as masters, and those who are undesirable.They know by experience or report where the best "huts" are provided, where tents are supplied, and where one must get along as one can.
Generally the regular flocks are under a "captain," who gathers his followers each season, manages them and looks after their interests and their employers'.In some cases the same captain brings his regiment to the same gardens year after year, and ends by counting himself as of the soil and almost of the family of his employer.Each hard, thick-fogged winter they fight through in their East End courts and streets, they look forward to the open-air weeks spent between long, narrow green groves of tall garlanded poles, whose wreathings hang thick with fresh and pungent-scented hop clusters.Children play " 'oppin" in dingy rooms and alleys, and talk to each other of days when the sun shone hot and birds were singing and flowers smelling sweet in the hedgerows; of others when the rain streamed down and made mud of the soft earth, and yet there was pleasure in the gipsying life, and high cheer in the fire of sticks built in the field by some bold spirit, who hung over it a tin kettle to boil for tea.They never forgot the gentry they had caught sight of riding or driving by on the road, the parson who came to talk, and the occasional groups of ladies from the "great house" who came into the gardens to walk about and look at the bins and ask queer questions in their gentry-sounding voices.They never knew anything, and they always seemed to be entertained.Sometimes there were enterprising, laughing ones, who asked to be shown how to strip the hops into the bins, and after being shown played at the work for a little while, taking off their gloves and showing white fingers with rings on.They always looked as if they had just been washed, and as if all of their clothes were fresh from the tub, and when anyone stood near them it was observable that they smelt nice.Generally they gave pennies to the children before they left the garden, and sometimes shillings to the women.The hop picking was, in fact, a wonderful blend of work and holiday combined.
Mount Dunstan had liked the "hopping" from his first memories of it.He could recall his sensations of welcoming a renewal of interesting things when, season after season, he had begun to mark the early stragglers on the road.The stragglers were not of the class gathered under captains.They were derelicts--tramps who spent their summers on the highways and their winters in such workhouses as would take them in; tinkers, who differ from the tramps only because sometimes they owned a rickety cart full of strange household goods and drunken tenth-hand perambulators piled with dirty bundles and babies, these last propelled by robust or worn-out, slatternly women, who sat by the small roadside fire stirring the battered pot or tending the battered kettle, when resting time had come and food must be cooked.
