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If hops only grew in the Far East we should think wonders of so powerful a plant. At hop-picking a girl can earn about 10s. a week, so that it is not such a highly paid employment as might be supposed from the talk there is about it. The advantages are sideways, so to say; a whole family can work at the same time, and the sum-total becomes considerable.
Without money, without friends, without useful education of any kind, he tramps the country, as you saw him, perhaps doing a little hop-picking or hay-making, in season, only happy when he obtains the means to get drunk.
Therefore, when a stranger, as at Brie, is tied up in a sheaf and told that he will "carry the key of the field," it is as much as to say that he is the Old Man, that is, an embodiment of the corn-spirit. In hop-picking, if a well-dressed stranger passes the hop-yard, he is seized by the women, tumbled into the bin, covered with leaves, and not released till he has paid a fine.
I, only a few minutes after, said something about wishing we were not "strangers." "Do you?" The lad's half amazed, half-grateful smile went right to my heart. "Have you been up and down the country much?" "A great deal these last three years; doing a hand's turn as best I could, in hop-picking, apple-gathering, harvesting; only this summer I had typhus fever, and could not work."
They only burned a small quantity here; they moved about from place to place in the woods, according as the timber was thrown. They often stopped for weeks in the woods, watching the fires all night. A great part of the work was done in the winter, beginning in October after the hop-picking.
With us, all women have been relieved from out-door labor, and are being sacrificed in the process, until they learn to supply its place. Except the graceful and vanishing pursuit of hop-picking, there is in New England no agricultural labor in which women can be said to be habitually engaged.
Hop-picking used to be the most notable of them, and even now, spite of the much-diminished acreage under hops, it is found necessary at the schools to defer the long holiday until September, because it would be impossible to get the children to school while the hops are being picked. For all the family goes into the gardens all, that is to say, who have no constant work.
These squatters consequently came to keep cows, sometimes one and sometimes two anticipating the three acres and a cow; and it is very odd to hear the women at the hop-picking telling each other they are going to churn to-night. They have, in fact, little dairies. Such are the better class of squatters.
It is almost the only time of the year when the labouring people have any cash; their weekly wages are mortgaged beforehand; the hop-picking money comes in a lump, and they have something to spend. Hundreds of pounds are paid to meet the tally or account kept by the pickers, the old word tally still surviving, and this has to be charmed out of their pockets.
Along the upper Sacramento River stretch the great hop-fields full of tall vines covered with light-green tassels. At hop-picking season many families have a month's picnic, children and all working day after day in the fields and pulling off the fragrant hops. Indians, too, are among the best hop-pickers.
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