wake
you. I said you didn't really want to come."

"Oh, yes, I did."

They walked down the road and then cut across the marshes. That way it was
under a mile to the sea. The water looked cold and gray, and Philip
shivered at the sight of it; but the others tore off their clothes and ran
in shouting. Sally did everything a little slowly, and she did not come
into the water till all the rest were splashing round Philip. Swimming was
his only accomplishment; he felt at home in the water; and soon he had
them all imitating him as he played at being a porpoise, and a drowning
man, and a fat lady afraid of wetting her hair. The bathe was uproarious,
and it was necessary for Sally to be very severe to induce them all to
come out.

"You're as bad as any of them," she said to Philip, in her grave, maternal
way, which was at once comic and touching. "They're not anything like so
naughty when you're not here."

They walked back, Sally with her bright hair streaming over one shoulder
and her sun-bonnet in her hand, but when they got to the huts Mrs. Athelny
had already started for the hop-garden. Athleny, in a pair of the oldest
trousers anyone had ever worn, his jacket buttoned up to show he had no
shirt on, and in a wide-brimmed soft hat, was frying kippers over a fire
of sticks. He was delighted with himself: he looked every inch a brigand.
As soon as he saw the party he began to shout the witches' chorus from
Macbeth over the odorous kippers.

"You mustn't dawdle over your breakfast or mother will be angry," he said,
when they came up.

And in a few minutes, Harold and Jane with pieces of bread and butter in
their hands, they sauntered through the meadow into the hop-field. They
were the last to leave. A hop-garden was one of the sights connected with
Philip's boyhood and the oast-houses to him the most typical feature of
the Kentish scene. It was with no sense of strangeness, but as though he
were at home, that Philip followed Sally through the long lines of the
hops. The sun was bright now and cast a sharp shadow. Philip feasted his
eyes on the richness of the green leaves. The hops were yellowing, and to
him they had the beauty and the passion which poets in Sicily have found
in the purple grape. As they walked along Philip felt himself overwhelmed
by the rich luxuriance. A sweet scent arose from the fat Kentish soil, and
the fitful September breeze was heavy with the goodly perfume of the hops.
Athelstan felt the exh