As the season advances, the women are to be found in the hop gardens and in the wheat and hay fields. Wheat, or “corn,” as it is called in Britain, is sown in drills about six inches apart, and as soon as it gets well started, the women go through it and hoe out the weeds.

In May, when the hop gardens are bristled all over with bare, newly set poles, around which the vines are just beginning to twine, there are pretty sure to be two or three women in every such field, “’op-tying,” as they would say. This consists in fastening the vines to the poles so that they will be sure to climb and not sprawl around on the ground. Most of the women wear wide brimmed straw hats tied on with handkerchiefs. Each has a long bag fastened to her waist, in which she carries the green rushes that she uses in tying. They work very deftly, though they keep their tongues going as fast as their hands.

Once in a visit of mine to a hop garden, a worker held her tawny arms out toward me and said, “I s’pose the women don’t get browned and burned that-a-way in America. But we’ve always been at this same work, and we’ll keep right on at it as long as we’ve got a breath left.”

It seemed to me they were doing the work with unusual celerity. I said as much, and the woman explained that this was because they were paid for the amount they did and not for their time; and she added frankly, “If it were day work, we’d stop that much to talk the ’ops wouldn’t get tied in all summer.”

Just as I was leaving the hop garden I heard a tree crash to the earth in a near grove, and when I turned aside to learn the cause I found several men felling oaks. They did this by sawing off the trunks low down, almost level with the ground. The stumps left were barely six inches high. Compared with that, the two or three foot stumps of America and the great gashes we make in getting our trees down seem very wasteful. The oak bark is sold to tanneries, and after a tree was felled the men with their axes, billhooks and other instruments stripped it off from both trunk and branches down to limbs not over an inch and a half in diameter.