REVIEWS AND EXCHANGES 
187 
Some of the perambulators are very heavy, and the younger 
children drag with all their weight on to hands and arms already 
over-full ; but all go by talking and laughing with never a cross 
or grumbling word among them. 
Is the thought of a hard day’s work well done so exhilarating ? 
Have the strong-smelling, enclosing green garlands such a 
bracing effect ? Or is it that you and I meet the hop-pickers 
within sight of their homes, and the thought that bears them 
bravely, cheerily over the last half-mile or so is the thought of 
tea and a well-earned rest ? 
The old women look up and smile as they pass ; the younger 
women push their piled-up perambulators with tired friendly 
faces. The girls have decked their hats with trails of hops, and 
carry bunches and sheaves of white campion, as well as hop- 
pickers’ luggage ; and some of the small boys whose lips and 
cheeks are stained with blackberry-juice, have bundles of 
green food under their arms for fasting and resentful rabbits. 
So the pickers cross the last field in the sunset, and the 
heavens are aflame with fiery clouds. The last waggon has 
passed over the distant bridge, where the moon as tallyman 
marks another notch in life’s little span, and with lingering 
steps we turn to follow the pickers ; but the sunset over the 
city and the full moon hung high over the plundered hop- 
gardens must have absorbed our thoughts altogether, for 
the .stream of self-made toilers has disappeared, so has the 
sun. The clouds have laid aside their rich apricot robes, and 
have donned instead diaphanous grey kirtles which look a little 
chilly. There comes a breath, a touch of sadness suddenly over 
everything. 
“ Ah ! ” you exclaim, as we face the wind, “ how the smell 
of hops lingers in the air ! ” 
And together we turn our footsteps homewards ; some stray 
silvery stars of thistledown float along the field in front of us, 
and a robin perched upon the gate through which we pass bursts 
into a small solitary song. Rachel. 
REVIEWS AND EXCHANGES. 
Heimatschutz. von Ernst RudorfF. Third edition. Munich and Leipzig 
George Muller. One Mark. 
Cassandra’s warnings are always in danger of being ignored from the too whole- 
sale character of her pessimism. We have sometimes doubted whether Mr. 
Ruskin did not rather provoke ridicule and even opposition by his strongly worded 
refusal of all concession to the Philistine. Herr RudorfF comes forward as a 
German Ruskin with a wholesale jeremiad on the sacrifice of natural beauty in 
its exploitation for industrial ends, and on the decline of German architecture. 
Foreign styles replace all that is national ; the streets are disfigured by glaring 
advertisements ; forests are to be regulated into an ugly but utilitarian monotony : 
rocky scenery has to give place to stone-quarries ; waterfalls are to generate 
electricity : historic and picturesque scenes are to be vulgarised by huge hotels, 
all built on the same plan : and the Passion Play is to be made a show for the 
