Bell always spoke of her as "my 'ooman," and, referring to the depletion of their exchequer on her returns from marketing in Evesham, often said, "I don't care who robs my 'ooman this side of the elm"--a notable tree about halfway between the town and the village--knowing that she would then have very little change left. CHAPTER III. THE HOP FOREMAN AND THE HOP DRIER. "Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, * * * * * How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke." --GRAY'S _Elegy_. Jarge was one of the most prominent characters among my men. He was not a native of the Vale, coming from the Lynches, a hilly district to the north of Evesham. He was a sturdy and very excellent workman. He did with his might whatsoever his hand found to do, and everything he undertook was a success. The beautifully trimmed hedge in front of his cottage-garden proclaimed his method and love of order at a glance. Jarge was a wag; he was the man who, like Shakespeare's clowns, stepped on to the stage at the critical moment and saved a serious situation with a quaint or epigrammatic expression. He was very scornful of the condition of the farm when I came, and it was he, whose reply to the late tenant that his arable land would soon be all grass, I have already quoted. In speaking to me, at almost our first interview, he could not refrain from an allusion to the foulness of the land; some peewits were circling over those neglected fields, and it was far from reassuring to be told--though he did not intend to discourage me--that "folks say, when you sees them things on the land, the farm's broke!" From the natural history point of view he was perfectly correct, as peewits generally frequent wild and uncultivated places where the ploughman and the labourer are rarely seen. Owing to the somewhat unconvincing fact of his wife's brother being a gamekeeper on the Marquis's estate near Jarge's native village, he had acquired, and retained through all the years of my farming, a sporting reputation; he was always the man selected for trapping any evil beast or bird that might be worrying us; and when the cherries were beginning to show ruddy complexions in the sunshine, and the starlings and blackbirds were becoming troublesome, armed with an old muzzle-loader of mine, he made incessant warfare against them, and his gun could be heard as early as five o'clock in the morning, while the shots would often come pattering down harmlessly on my greenhouse. There came a time when some thieving carrion crows were robbing my half-tame wild duck's nests of their eggs, and Jarge was, of course, detailed to tackle them. Weeks elapsed without any result; the depredations continued, and the men began to chaff him; finally Bell "put the lid on," as people say nowadays, by the following sally: "Ah, Jarge, if ever thee catches a craw 'twill be one as was hatched from an addled egg!"