rs 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 garde