"I neither want to scald my pigs, nor toast my cheese, not I,
Afore the butcher sticks 'em or the factor comes to buy;
They shanna catch me here again to risk my limbs and loife;
I've nought at whoam to blow me up except it be my woif."
CHAPTER XVIII.
HOPS--INSECT ATTACKS--HOP FAIRS.
"Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest and despair most fits."
--_All's Well that Ends Well_.
In a very rare black-letter book on hop culture, _A Perfite Platforme
of a Hoppe Garden_, published in the year 1578 and therefore over 340
years old, the author, Reynolde Scot, has the following quaint remarks
on one of the disorders to which the hop plant is liable:
"The hoppe that liketh not his entertainment, namely his seat, his
ground, his keeper, or the manner of his setting, comith up thick and
rough in leaves, very like unto a nettle; and will be much bitten with
a little black flye, who, also, will not do harme unto good hoppes,
who if she leave the leaf as full of holes as a nettle, yet she
seldome proceedeth to the utter destruction of the Hoppe; where the
garden standeth bleake, the heat of summer will reform this matter."
Thomas Tusser, who lived 1515 to 1580, in his _Five Hundred Points of
Good Husbandry_, included many seasonable verses on Hop-growing, among
which the following are worth quoting:
MAY.
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