346 THE BOOK OF USEFUL PLANTS 



feel papery and September is at hand, women and 

 children from the cities go out to the hop harvest 

 in England and the United States. New York 

 has a large hop-growing section near Syracuse. 

 The average picker gets forty to sixty bushels 

 picked in a day. The boxes are carried to the 

 dry house, where the hops are spread on a cloth 

 that lies on a slatted floor above a room heated 

 by a furnace. Sulphur, burned at first, bleaches 

 color out of the hops, which come out a pale straw 

 color twelve hours after they enter the dry, hot 

 atmosphere. They are cooled and sweated, then 

 pressed into solid cakes by hand presses. These 

 bricks of hops, in cloth cases, weigh nearly 200 

 pounds, and are five feet long and twenty inches 

 square at the ends. In this condition they keep 

 indefinitely. 



The cultivated hop is merely the wild species, 

 native to Europe and America, member of the 

 Nettle Family, brought into domestication. No- 

 where does it grow in greater luxuriance than along 

 river banks, where it finds rich, moist soil, and 

 plenty of support in climbing. 



The price of hops is peculiarly liable to change. 

 Not many years ago it flopped from 12 cents to 

 $1.20 the pound, without any noticeable reason 

 for the astonishing difference. Ordinarily the 



