For these women and girls of the farm, and the day labourers who had worked in the morning in the hop-field, had assembled, since the mid-day meal in the narrow, long yard of the Ramspachers' farm. Seated on chairs or stools, each one having on their right a hamper or a basket and on their left a heap of hops, they picked off the flowers and threw away the stripped stalks. They formed two lines--one along the stable walls and the other the length of the house. This made an avenue of fair heads and bodies in movement among the piles of leaves, which stretched from one woman to another and bound them together as it were with a garland. At the end, the cart door opened wide on to the square of the town of Alsheim, and allowed the gables of several houses situated opposite to be seen--with their wooden balconies and the flat tiles of their roofings. By this road every half hour fresh loads of hops arrived drawn by one of the farm horses. Old Ramspacher, the farmer, was at his post, in the enormous barn in front of the dwelling-house, and before which sat the first pickers, at work on the little hop cones. In this building, whose vast roof was supported by a wall on one side, on the other by Vosges pines, the greater part of the work of the farm was done, and much wealth was stored here. Here they trod the grapes; in the autumn and winter months they threshed corn. They kept all the implements of labour in the corner--the covered carts, planks and building materials, empty barrels, and a little hay. There were also many great wooden cases piled up, tiers of screens, on which they put the hops to dry every year. The farmer never allowed others to do this delicate work. So he was at his place, in front of the drying-room, where the first shelves were already full, and standing on a ladder he spread equal layers of the gathered hops, which his sons brought him in hampers. The heat of the afternoon, at the end of August, the odour of crushed leaves and flowers, which clung to their hands intoxicated the women slightly. The laughter rose louder than in the hop-fields in the morning, and questions were asked and remarks made which called forth twenty answers. Sometimes it was the work which furnished a pretext for this fusillade of words. Sometimes it was a neighbour passing across the square all white with dust and sunshine; but mostly the talk was about two things: the visit of the Prefect and the probable marriage of Lucienne. The beautiful Juliette, the sacristan's daughter, had begun the conversation saying: "I tell you Victor told it to the mason's son: the Prefect is to arrive in half an hour. Do you think I shall move when he comes?" "He would see a very pretty girl," said Augustine Ramspacher, lifting up two hampers of hops. "It is only the ugly ones who will let themselves be seen."