pperfield._

TAKING advantage of an excursion train (for tramps usually go on the
cheap), we start early on Wednesday by the South-Eastern Railway from
Chatham station for Broadstairs. As usual the weather favours us--it is
a glorious day. Passing the stations of New Brompton, Rainham,
Newington, and Sittingbourne, we soon get into open country, in the
midst of hop gardens with their verdant aisles of the fragrant and
tonic, tendril-like plants reaching in some instances perhaps to several
hundred yards, and crowned with yellowish-green fruit-masses, which
have a special charm for those unaccustomed to such scenery. The
odd-looking "oast-houses,"[32] or drying-houses for the hops, are a
noticeable feature of the neighbourhood, dotting it about here and there
in pairs. They are mostly red-brick and cone-shaped, somewhat smaller
than the familiar glass-houses of the Midland districts, and have a
wooden cowl, painted white, at the apex for ventilation. We are rather
too early for the hop-picking, and thus--but for a time only--miss an
interesting sight. Dickens, in one of his letters to Forster, gives a
dreary picture of this annual harvest:--

"Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and breathe in
at the key-hole of the house door. I have been amazed, before this year,
by the number of miserable lean wretches, hardly able to crawl, who come
hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that the dust of the
newly-picked hop, falling freshly into the throat, is a cure for
consumption. So the poor creatures drag themselves along the roads, and
sleep under wet hedges, and get cured soon and finally."

On the whole it is said to be a very indifferent season, but many
plantations look promising. "If," as a grower remarks to us in the
train, "we could have a little more of this fine weather! There has been
too much rain, and too little sun this year." The apples also are a poor
crop.

[Illustration: Hop-picking in Kent]

On a second visit to this pleasant neighbourhood, we see at Mear's Barr
Farm, near Rainham, the whole process of hop-picking. True, it is not
executed by that ragamuffinly crowd of strangers which Dickens had in
his "mind's eye" when he wrote the words just quoted, and which
usually takes possession of most of the hop-growing districts of Kent
during the picking season, but by an assemblage of native villagers,
mostly women, girls, and boys,--neat, clean, and homely,--together with
a few men