ns 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. Gipsies there were who had cooking fires
also, and hobbled horses cropping the grass. Now and then appeared a
grand one, who was rumoured to be a Lee and therefore royal, and who
came and lived regally in a gaily painted caravan. During the late
summer weeks one began to see slouching figures tramping along the high
road at intervals. These were men who were old, men who were middle-aged
and some who were young, all of them more or less dust-grimed,
weather-beaten, or ragged. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy
beery slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking lazily,
or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment. Such as these
were drifting in early that they might be on the ground when pickers
were wanted. They were the forerunners of the regular army.

On his walk to West Ways, the farm Bolter lived on, Mount Dunstan passed
two or three