From dawn of a day already warmed by wafts of hot air, women had set themselves to walk up what is called "the heights of Alsheim," the region where the cultivated land, hollowed like a bow, will bear hops. Some hundreds of yards from the border of the forest high poles in battle array bore up the green tendrils. They looked like very pointed tents of foliage, or belfries--for the millions of little cones, formed of green scales sprinkled with pollen, swung themselves from the extreme top to the ground like bells whose ringer is the wind. All the inhabitants know the event of the day--one picks hops for M. Bastian. The master, up before dawn, was already in the hop-field, examining each foot, calculating the value of his crop, pressing and crushing in his fingers one of the little muslin-like pine cones whose perfume attracts the bees. At the back on the stubble furrows are two narrow wagons, harnessed to a horse, waiting for the harvest, and near them was Ramspacher the farmer, his two sons Augustin and François, and a farm servant. The women, on the direct road leading up there, came up in irregular bands, three in file, then five abreast, then one following the others, the only one who was old. Each one had put on a working dress of some thin stuff, discoloured and the worse for wear, except, however, the grocer's daughter, Ida, who wore a nearly new dress, blue with white spots, and another elegant girl from Alsheim, Juliette, a brunette, the daughter of the sacristan, and she had a fashionable bodice and a checked apron, pink and white. The greater number were without hats, and had only the shade of their hair, of every tint of fairness, to preserve their complexions. They walked along quietly and heavily. They were young and fresh. They laughed. The farm boy mounted on a farm horse, going to the fields, the reapers, encamped in a corner, and the motionless man with the scythe in the soft lucerne turned their heads, and their eyes followed these women workers, whom one did not generally see in the country: needlewomen, dressmakers, apprentices, all going as if to a fête towards the hop-field of M. Bastian. The vibration of words they could not hear flew to them on the wind that dried the dew. The weather was fair. Some old people, the pickers of fallen fruit beneath the scattered apple- and walnut-trees, rose from their stooping posture, and blinked their eyes to see the happy band of girls coming up the forest road. These girls without baskets such as the bilberry and whortleberry pickers, and raspberry gatherers had to carry.