THE END OF SUMMER 263 



to smell the smell, bitter and never to be too much sniffed 

 and enjoyed, that travels v^^ide over the fields. For the 

 hop drier has lit his tv^^o fires of Welsh coal and brim- 

 stone and charcoal under the two cones of the oast house, 

 and has spread his couch of strav^ on the floor v^^here he 

 can sleep his many little sleeps in the busy day and night. 

 The oast house consists of the pair of cones, w^hite-vaned 

 and tiled, upon their tv^^o circular chambers in which the 

 fires are lit. Attached to these on one side is a brick 

 building of two large rooms, one upon the ground, where 

 the hop drier sleeps and tends his fires, lighted only by 

 doors at either side and divided by the wooden pillars 

 which support the floor of the upper room. This, the 

 oast chamber, reached by a ladder, is a beautiful room, 

 its oak boards polished by careful use and now stained 

 faintly by the green-gold of hops, its roof raftered and 

 high and dim. Light falls upon it on one side from 

 two low windows, on the opposite side from a door 

 through which the hops arrive from the garden. The 

 waggon waits below the door, full of the loose, stained 

 hop-sacks which the carter and his boy lift up to the 

 drier. From the floor two short ladders lead to the doors 

 in the cones where the hops are suspended on canvas 

 floors above the kilns. The inside of the cone is full of 

 coiling fumes which have killed the young swallows in 

 the nests under the cowl — the parents return again and 

 again, but dare no longer alight on their old perches on 

 the vanes. When dried the hops are poured out on 

 the floor of the vast chamber in a lisping scaly pile, and 

 the drier is continually sweeping back those which are 

 scattered. Through a hole in the floor he forces them 

 down into a sack reaching to the floor of the room below. 



