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They crowd all the roads, and camp under all the hedges and on all the scraps of common-land, and live among and upon the hops until they are all picked, and the hop-gardens, so beautiful through the summer, look as if they had been laid waste by an invading army.
There is an air redolent of ripening fruit, and hops, for Dapplemere is a place of orchards, and hop-gardens, and rick-yards, while, here and there, the sharp-pointed, red-tiled roof of some oast-house pierces the green.
By shady copse and rustling cornfield; past lonely farms and rick-yards; past placid cows that chewed, somnolent, in the shade of trees or stood knee-deep in stilly pools; past hop-gardens from whose long, green alleys stole a fragrance warm and acridly sweet; past rippling streams that murmured drowsily, sparkling amid mossy boulders or over pebbly beds; past rustics stooped to their leisured toil who straightened bowed backs to peer after us under sunburned hands; wheresoever I looked, I found some new matter for delight.
For all that, however, the Yard made no display, but kept itself snug under hill-sides of corn-fields, hop-gardens, and orchards; its great chimneys smoking with a quiet- -almost a lazy air, like giants smoking tobacco; and the great Shears moored off it, looking meekly and inoffensively out of proportion, like the Giraffe of the machinery creation.
The wagtails appear to be the first of the migrant birds to return, long before the hail of April rattles against the windows and leaps up in the short grass. Out in the hop-gardens the poles are placed ready for setting, in conical heaps at a distance resembling the tents of an army.
Why, there are hares in the fields, and pheasants in the coppices, and partridges in the hop-gardens, and the rabbits swarm in the hill-sides down toward the sea." "But you don't shoot!" "Not much, because I have no gun, only a pistol, and it don't carry straight. I did nearly hit a rabbit, though, with it." "But can you get away shooting?" "Can I? Should think I can.
"I have an old house among the Kentish hop-gardens," I went on; "no one lives there at present except a care-taker, but it is within the bounds of probability that I may go to stay there some day. Now the gardens need trimming, and I'm very fond of flowers; do you suppose you could make the place look decent in say, a month?"
Then the train, struggling slowly out of London's welter, through the newest outposts of gloom and grime, bore them, hearts companioned in love and blamelessness, to the broad sunny meadows and the sweet hop-gardens of Kent. 'Serves her jolly well right, said Beatrice. 'A lot she'll care, said Fanny. 'I should think myself precious lucky.
Oke, and make him doubly dense of comprehension. So, if Oke had something to say, which he evidently had, it was better to wait for him. Oke, however, broke the silence only by pointing out to me the condition of the hops, as we passed one of his many hop-gardens. "It will be a poor year," he said, stopping short and looking intently before him "no hops at all. No hops this autumn."
There were no hop-gardens, as on the farms inland, no white-cowled oasts, and scarcely more than twelve acres under the plough. Three hundred acres of pasture spread round Ansdore, dappled over with the big Kent sheep the road from Pedlinge to Brodnyx went through them, curling and looping and doubling to the demands of the dykes.
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