ilaration instinctively, for he lifted up his voice
and sang; it was the cracked voice of the boy of fifteen, and Sally turned
round.

"You be quiet, Athelstan, or we shall have a thunderstorm."

In a moment they heard the hum of voices, and in a moment more came upon
the pickers. They were all hard at work, talking and laughing as they
picked. They sat on chairs, on stools, on boxes, with their baskets by
their sides, and some stood by the bin throwing the hops they picked
straight into it. There were a lot of children about and a good many
babies, some in makeshift cradles, some tucked up in a rug on the soft
brown dry earth. The children picked a little and played a great deal. The
women worked busily, they had been pickers from childhood, and they could
pick twice as fast as foreigners from London. They boasted about the
number of bushels they had picked in a day, but they complained you could
not make money now as in former times: then they paid you a shilling for
five bushels, but now the rate was eight and even nine bushels to the
shilling. In the old days a good picker could earn enough in the season to
keep her for the rest of the year, but now there was nothing in it; you
got a holiday for nothing, and that was about all. Mrs. Hill had bought
herself a pianner out of what she made picking, so she said, but she was
very near, one wouldn't like to be near like that, and most people thought
it was only what she said, if the truth was known perhaps it would be
found that she had put a bit of money from the savings bank towards it.

The hoppers were divided into bin companies of ten pickers, not counting
children, and Athelny loudly boasted of the day when he would have a
company consisting entirely of his own family. Each company had a bin-man,
whose duty it was to supply it with strings of hops at their bins (the bin
was a large sack on a wooden frame, about seven feet high, and long rows
of them were placed between the rows of hops;) and it was to this position
that Athelny aspired when his family was old enough to form a company.
Meanwhile he worked rather by encouraging others than by exertions of his
own. He sauntered up to Mrs. Athelny, who had been busy for half an hour
and had already emptied a basket into the bin, and with his cigarette
between his lips began to pick. He asserted that he was going to pick more
than anyone that day, but mother; of course no one could pick so much as
mother; that reminded