The other kind is of sterner stuff. Who rides far must feed well. Tea for the hard rider, no less than for the ambling lady cyclist, is essential, but it must be tea with a tang to it, and plenty of it; and it gets mixed, in course of feeding, with such meats as the “Rest” affords, with the result—a medical expert would say—that the interior of that cyclist is converted into a tannery, and his food turned to leather by the tannic acid of his drink. And yet I never heard of a healthy, active cyclist being inconvenienced, much less laid low, by such immoral feeding. [Illustration: THE “BLUE BOYS” INN.] It is a solitary road beyond Pembury Green, varied only by a few scattered houses, all the way to Lamberhurst. Kipping’s Cross is the first of these intervals, and there stands the “Blue Boys” inn, with an oast-house for only neighbour. The “Blue Boys” is practically dated by its odd picture sign, showing two blue-jacketed postboys shaking hands and lifting each a convivial glass, whether to their noble selves or to George the Fourth, whose medallion portrait is below, cannot be said. Beyond the inn is the cross-road leading to Goudhurst, scene of many incidents in the history of smuggling. Between this point and Lamberhurst, four miles distant, there were, in the once-upon-a-time of coaching days, two turnpike-gates. The pikeman’s house remains at both places. The level tract of land at this point was known to old road-books as “Lindridge Causeway,” and owed its name, according to John Harris, who wrote a “History of Kent” in 1719, to one Lindridge, who was born in 1560, lived in a house adjacent to Lamberhurst, and “built a handsome causeway here, called after him.” At that time there was still a stone to his memory in the porch of Lamberhurst church. The name of “Lamberhurst Quarter,” given to the district on this hill-top above Lamberhurst village, is one of those many mysteries of place-names that now can never be authoritatively explained; but it is supposed to derive from some ancient partition of the manor into four parts—quarters of a knight’s fee. Down below, on the right hand, are spread out the many-serried ranks of the hop-gardens. You look down upon them as a commanding officer might upon his phalanxed battalions. XXX Hops are grown in the neighbourhood of Lamberhurst almost as extensively as around Maidstone itself, which every one knows to be the metropolis of the cultivation. The hop-gardens are the vineyards of England, and so marked a feature that it surprises the inquirer who learns that the brewer’s hop was not introduced to this country until the reign of Henry the Eighth. “Hops and heresy came in together,” the Roman Catholics were wont to remark.