HOP-GARDENS AND FARMING 75 



prosperity may be attributed to its successful cultivation. 

 It puzzles us to surmise how the sturdy heroes of the 

 Armada days and the Spanish and Low Country wars 

 fought so well as they did, considering that we are told 

 by the Rev. Mr. Harrington, who wrote his lively 

 memoirs in Queen Elizabeth's time, that England then 

 produced 25,000 tuns of wine annually and such wine 

 as it must have been ! And the choicest of these hop- 

 gardens are in the most enchanting situations, on the 

 steeps of hills, yet in the middle of woods that break 

 the winds which are so fatal to the bines. Often flinty, 

 the soil would seem unfit to grow even thistles ; and the 

 more laboriously it is tilled and manured the more do 

 the flints come to the surface. After all, however, that 

 is the less astonishing, since it is the same with some of 

 the rarest vineyards that yield the world-famed vintages 

 of the Gironde. And from these picturesque eminences, 

 looking down through the natural vistas, you get a series 

 of panoramic glimpses of the glories of the Weald 

 framed in a long succession of flowery archways, 



But we have lingered long enough in the hop- 

 gardens, so by way of changing the scene we may take 

 a look at the cottages and farmhouses. If the farming 

 is picturesque, with the irregular fields and copsy hedge- 

 rows, with the crops of thistle and yellow ragweed, and 

 the ditches overgrown with grass and bindweed, so are 

 the farmhouses. They have nothing in common with 

 the bare, neat, substantial steading of stone and lime 

 that you see in the Carse of Gowrie or the north- 

 eastern Scotch counties. Almost invariably they are 



