“Grandad Hopping With the Rest”

Sometimes the “squire,” the occupant of the big house, comes into the hayfield and takes part in the work. He gets off his coat and pitches on the hay with great gusto for perhaps a couple of hours, chaffs with the men, drinks beer with them, and makes himself as companionable as possible. The men feel that he is a good fellow to condescend to work on their level, and it inclines them to serve him faithfully. But it would not do for the squire to work every day with them; that would lower him at once in their estimation. The work is beneath him; he must do it only for fun.

The term “harvest time,” in England, means more particularly that part of summer when the wheat and other cereals are garnered. There is a repetition then of the busy scenes of haymaking. After the harvest the farmer turns his pigs out “earshin” in the stubble fields, where they are allowed to roam six or seven hours each day till they have picked up all the stray ears of grain. Often there are sixty or seventy pigs in a drove, with a boy or two along to “mind” them.

Hop-picking begins with the first days of September. By then the blossoming brightness of the earlier months is past, the grain is nearly all reaped, the hay harvested, and the fields are bare and sombre. Yet many flowers still linger along the roadsides, and the hedges are enlivened by the scarlet of hips and haws. There is much land recently ploughed, and many new ricks are in the field corners, looking very tidy with their roofs of fresh thatch glistening in the sunlight.

I was eager to see all that I could of the hop harvest; and one day when I was passing a hop kiln and noticed smoke issuing from its squat chimney, I stopped to investigate. A small door at one end was open, and I went in; but I did not stay long. Three men in the dim interior were feeding the fires with charcoal and brimstone, and the air was so sulphurous I was glad to hurry out to escape choking. I got little notion of the process of hop-drying. The men had pointed to a ladder and said I might go upstairs, but I was already getting anxious for a change of air and refused.