The fires are on the ground level. Above, the hops are spread on the drying-floor, formed of wire-netting, covered with hair-cloth. Through this the warm air ascends, and in twelve hours some 1,050 lb. weight of hops are dried, and incidentally reduced by the evaporation of the moisture in them to 200 lb. The heat ascends and leaves the oast-house by the cowl, which turns on bearings, according to the direction of the wind. From the drying-floor to the cooling-floor the hops are transferred with a wooden shovel, and then packed into the “pockets.” “Pockets” are sacks, and are nowadays filled by being suspended from a hole in the floor, and filled with the light feathery dried hops; and then repeatedly pressed down, re-filled and re-pressed by a heavy iron screw-press. In the result, a pocket of hops is as hard and unyielding to the touch as a mass of iron, and samples cut from it hold together like so much cake-tobacco. The older method of packing was for a “jumper” to press the hops down by his own unaided efforts. XXXI Those who would find Lamberhurst church must diligently seek it, for it lies quite away from the village, on the hill-top, beside the manor-house, which you approach past a long line of pyramidical yew-trees, so like those of toy Noah’s Arks that you look instinctively for their wooden stands. Like most manor-houses in Kent, this is styled the “Court Lodge.” The Court Lodge itself is a stone building of considerable age, with the desolating gaunt exterior of a workhouse; and the church, standing behind it, is in appearance—and in some sort in fact—an appanage of the lord of the manor, for it stands, with the residence, in the middle of his park. It is a very charming old church, with a shingled spire, and deeply embowered in dark heavy trees, as though Nature herself had put on a solemn mood, in deference to the spirit of the place. Most prominent in the approach is a fine eighteenth-century monument, like a tea-caddy, with an epitaph starting off suddenly in this wise: Virgil Pomfret, Gent Liv^d so Respected That when the Sable Train of Mourning Friends Attended his breathless Corps Here to be Entomb^d Each tear ful Eye seem’d thus to Say There Goes an Honest Man 1765 Aged 77 This is followed by an inscription stating how Virgil Pomfret’s wife was “Virtuous and Discreet,” and this by another that tells us how, in the same year, Virgil Pomfret, junior, was “snatch’d away By the Small Pox,” aged 28. I think it gives that dreadful disease an added terror to personify it in this larcenous way. At the foot of the hill lies quiet, beautiful Lamberhurst. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has not inaptly named it “Slumberhurst,” and Cobbett, not given to indiscriminate praise, spoke of it as “a very pretty place, lying in a valley with beautiful hills round it.”