The last operation in the hop garden is stacking the poles, and burning the bine, a most inflammable material which makes a prodigious blaze. As the men watch the leaping flames the same remark is made year after year—"fire is a good servant, but a bad master." These fires seem a great waste of good fibrous matter, as in former times the bine was utilized for making coarse sacking and brown paper. During the war I suggested to the National Salvage Council that, owing to the scarcity of both these articles, it might be worth while to attempt the resuscitation of the manufacture. The suggestion was followed by experiments which produced quite a useful brown paper of which I received a sample, but the cost of treatment was unfortunately prohibitive from the commercial point of view.
Worcester hop fair is the start of the trade, and the market is held behind the Hop-Pole Hotel, where there are spacious stores and offices for the merchants. When the crop is bountiful the stores are filled to overflowing, and the ancient Guildhall built in 1721 has to be requisitioned. On either side of the doorway stand the statues of Carolus I. and Carolus II., who must have watched the entrance and the exit of innumerable pockets. Worcester is distinguished as the Faithful City, for like the County it had small use for Cromwell and his Roundheads; and to this day, on the date of the restoration of Charles II.—"the twenty-ninth of May, oak apple day"—a spray of oak or an oak-apple is in some villages worn as a badge of loyalty, the penalty for non-observance being a stroke on the hands with a stinging-nettle.
It was a great relief to get away from my 300 pickers and ride the eighteen miles to Worcester on my bicycle, through the lovely river scenery of the Vale of Evesham, the hedges drooping beneath the weight of brilliant berries, the orchards loaded with apples, the clean bright stubbles, and the cattle in the lush aftermath; then, after a visit to the busy hop-market and a stroll among the curio shops in New Street, to return by a different road as the shadows were lengthening beside the copses and the hedgerow timber trees.
In former times the October fair at Weyhill, near Andover, was the market for the Hampshire and Farnham hops; it was the custom for the growers to send them by road, and load back with cheese brought to the fair by the Wiltshire farmers. I heard of a Hampshire grower, who in a year of great scarcity had spent some time trying to sell several pockets to an anxious but reluctant buyer, unwilling to give the price asked—£20 a hundredweight. They continued the deal in the evening at the inn at Andover, where both were staying, and said "Good-night" without having concluded the bargain. The grower was in bed and almost asleep when he heard a knock at his door, and a voice, "Give you £18," which he refused. Next morning trade was dull and the buyer would not repeat his offer, and at the end of the week the grower sent his hops home again. Prices continued to fall, until two years later he sold the same lot at 5s. a hundredweight to a cunning speculator, who took them out to sea, after claiming a return of the duty (about £1 a hundredweight originally paid by the grower), which the Excise refunded on exported hops. The hops went overboard of course, and the buyer netted the difference between the price he paid and the amount received for the refunded duty.
At these old fairs the showmen and gipsies take large sums in the "pleasure" departments for admission to their exhibitions—swings, roundabouts, shooting-galleries, and coco-nut shies. In Evesham Post-Office a gipsy woman once asked me to write a letter; she handed me an order for £10, and instructed me to send it to a London firm for £5 worth of best coco-nuts and £5 worth of seconds. They were for use on the shies; it struck me as a large supply, and the economical division of the qualities as ingenious.
CHAPTER XIX.
METEOROLOGY—ETON AND HARROW AT LORD'S—"RUS IN URBE."
"But if I praised the busy town,
He loved to rail against it still,
For 'ground in yonder social mill
We rub each other's angles down,
"'And merge,' he said, 'in form and gloss
The picturesque of man and man.'"
—In Memoriam.
During the terribly wet summer of 1879 the following lines were written—it was said by the then Bishop of Wakefield—in the visitors' book at the White Lion Hotel at Bala, in Wales: