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at work, talking and laughing as they picked. They sat on
chairs, on stools, on boxes, with their baskets by their sides,
and some stood by the bin throwing the hops they picked
straight into it. There were a lot of children about and a
good many babies, some in makeshift cradles, some tucked
up in a rug on the soft brown dry earth. The children picked
a little and played a great deal. The women worked busily,
they had been pickers from childhood, and they could pick
twice as fast as foreigners from London. They boasted about
the number of bushels they had picked in a day, but they
complained you could not make money now as in former
times: then they paid you a shilling for five bushels, but now
the rate was eight and even nine bushels to the shilling. In
the old days a good picker could earn enough in the sea-
son to keep her for the rest of the year, but now there was
nothing in it; you got a holiday for nothing, and that was
about all. Mrs. Hill had bought herself a pianner out of what
she made picking, so she said, but she was very near, one
wouldn’t like to be near like that, and most people thought
it was only what she said, if the truth was known perhaps
it would be found that she had put a bit of money from the
savings bank towards it.
The hoppers were divided into bin companies of ten
pickers, not counting children, and Athelny loudly boast-
ed of the day when he would have a company consisting
entirely of his own family. Each company had a bin-man,
whose duty it was to supply it with strings of hops at their
bins (the bin was a large sack on a wooden frame, about
seven feet high, and long rows of them were placed between

0 Of Human Bondage