waggon approach and arrive and die away. And so day after day the fires glow with ruby and sapphire and emerald; the cone wears its plume of smoke; and everything is yellow-green--the very scent of the drying hops can hardly be otherwise described, in its mixture of sharpness and mellowness. Then when the last sack is pressed benches are placed round the chamber and a table at one end. The master, who is giving up the farm, leans on the table and pays each picker and pole-puller and measurer, with a special word for each and a jest for the women. Ale and gin and cakes are brought in, and the farmer leaves the women and one or two older men to eat and drink. The women in their shabby black skirts and whitish blouses shuffle through a dance or two, all modern and some American. One old man tipsily tottering recalls the olden time with a step-dance down the room; some laugh at him, others turn up their new roseate noses. Next year the hops are to be grubbed up; the old man to be turned out of his cottage--for he has paid no rent these seven years; but now it is cakes and ale, and the farmer has hiccupped a lying promise that his successor will go on growing hops. HAMPSHIRE. To-day is fair day. The scene is a green, slightly undulating common, grassy and rushy at its lower end where a large pond wets the margin of the high road, and at the upper end sprinkled with the dwarf and the common gorse out of which rise many tumuli, green or furzy mounds of earth, often surmounted by a few funereal pines. The common is small; it is bounded on every side by roads, and on one by a row of new mean houses; there is a golf-house among the tumuli; in one place a large square has been ploughed and fenced by a private owner. But the slope of the sandy soil is pleasant; in one place it is broken into a low cliff overhanging the water, and this with the presence of the gorse give it a touch of the wildness by which it may still deserve its name of “heath.” Most powerful of all in their effect upon the place are the tumuli. They are low and smooth; one or two scarcely heave the turf; some have been removed; and there is no legend attached to them. Yet their presence gives an indescribable charm and state, and melancholy too, and makes these few acres an expanse unequalled by any other of the same size. Not too far off to be said to belong to the heath, from which they are separated by three miles of cultivated land and a lesser beechen hill, are the Downs; among them one that bears a thin white road winding up at the edge of a dark wood. In the moist October air the Downs are very grave and gentle and near, and are not lost to sight until far beyond the turreted promontory of Chanctonbury.