Hopping

“ A lady of prodigious fame, Whose hollow eyes and hopper breech Made common people call her witch.
1719. Durfey, Pills, etc., vi., 351. And there’ll be hopper-arsed Nancy.
1785. Grose, Vulg. Tongue, s.v.
Hopper-docker, subs. (old) .—A shoe. For synonyms, see Trotter-cases.
Hop-picker, subs. (common) .—1. A prostitute; also Hopping-wife. For synonyms, see Barrack-hack and Tart.
1888. Indoor Paupers, p. 55. Numbers of them go regularly to the hop-gardens; and each man must have a female companion—a hopping wife as she is termed. ”

“ It was strange, the way the strangler held his eyes on the other. Even when, having reached the loom, he dropped his basket and transferred the shuttles to the empty basket on top of the loom, he did not move his eyes. His eyes remained motionless while his face, his head, his whole body moved about them. When he stooped to his own basket, his face was turned up; when he reached above into the red-striped man’s basket, his face was turned down; always, whatever might be the position of his body, his eyes, fixed, were upon the red-striped convict, standing there, motionless and impenetrable. ”

“ On debouching from the road over which the tall poles with the slender stems of the hops twining and clambering, though leafless and faded, formed an archway through the thick and dense hop gardens that bordered each side of the way, the advanced guard uttered a shout of surprise and defiance, and halted till the main body came up. ”

“ To climb higher would only be to cut off all chance of retreat, and would inevitably mean capture or a leap which would, in all human probability, break my neck. In the space of a second I reasoned it all out, and as he approached on one side I descended on the other. Seeing this he descended too, and with such amazing rapidity that, although I had a considerable start, we both landed on the ground at the same instant. ”

“ He used to walk with her in the evening. He was working hard those days; at night he'd be tired. They'd stroll gently up a canyon (Co-ed Canyon, I think he called it) . They'd sit in the grass. He'd rest his head on her shoulder. Then she'd stroke that tired head, run her light fingers through his——
"Man, man!" he shouted; "imagine that, now. Imagine me there once more, and she, with that familiar gesture, that sacred gesture, running her fingers——"
Slowly he passed his hands over the atrocious smoothness of his cranium in a long, shuddering movement. ”

“ He smoked; the blue haze of his cigar blended with the blue rays of the moon, and the murmur of their voices harmonized caressingly with the whisper of wavelets along the boat's dark flanks. Then, one white and gold dawn, there was a running clang of anchor, a long roaring blast of the siren; the quarantine launch steamed back toward the Pasig as if in panic, and the little steamer began to glide. ”

“ Presently a plaited rope, like the finest silk, was thrown across our stern, catching on one of the knobs of the rail. A man who looked like an athlete was quickly climbing up it, and half a dozen others followed his lead. The rope broke and they all fell to the ground in a heap. Seeing the danger which might ensue if we went any lower, we decided to leave this strange city behind without landing, and then amid the shouts and lamentations of the populace took our upward and onward course once more. ”

“ Supposing that we have noticed the shoot, when it began to bend over, pointed toward the window—say a north window—and that, when we next look at it after some hours, it points into the room, that is to say, south, and again, north after another interval, we shall have discovered the curious fact that the hop-plant has a certain power of movement by which its shoot may sometimes point in one direction, sometimes in another. ”

“ There was a shock forward, the launch came almost to a dead stop, then churned on again; there was another shock, then shock after shock, the boat recoiling to each and charging on again. A ringing tattoo, as if some giant forward with a hundred arms were beating with clubs the bow of the boat, resounded, then a fusillade of crackling wood. Things scraped along the flanks, like the tentacles of a devil-fish. The boy peered out to the right, and in the luminous smother he made out a long line of bamboo poles sticking out of the sea. "A fish-corral," he cried. ”

“ Everything is flying. The hop-gardens turn gracefully towards me, presenting regular avenues of hops in rapid flight, then whirl away. So do the pools and rushes, haystacks, sheep, clover in full bloom delicious to the sight and smell, corn-sheaves, cherry-orchards, apple-orchards, reapers, gleaners, hedges, gates, fields that taper off into little angular corners, cottages, gardens, now and then a church. ”

“ Should hops, or any other under-crop, be designed to be raised, it will be requisite to trench the whole of the ground; but, in either case, the spade must be carried to the depth of the natural soil. ”

“ Our first slide into the abyss itself, from the belt of foam above, had carried us to a great distance down the slope; but our farther descent was by no means proportionate. Round and round we swept—not with any uniform movement—but in dizzying swings and jerks, that sent us sometimes only a few hundred yards—sometimes nearly the complete circuit of the whirl. Our progress downward, at each revolution, was slow, but very perceptible. ”

“ Had I reflected, I should not have wondered that a human being, swinging round in the air, with a boat-hook in his hand, and a long rope dragging behind him, like a tail, should attract the attention of even a brute creature.
My uncommon figure gave, as I afterwards understood, occasion for strange reports to the inhabitants on my side of the planet. ”

“ All work is done in a leisurely fashion. An old horse is discharging cargo by means of a whim, instead of a steam crane, from a Dutch-looking lugger. Piles of hop bales litter the landing-place, and it would seem almost as if their hypnotic influence had cast a sleepy spell over the whole environment. ”

“ There was, indeed, three feet below the window-sill a rough string-course, which might give to a fugitive a moment's finger-hold before dropping to earth. But the fall between shoes and ground would be some two and a half yards—a serious matter even for an acrobat so placed that he could not watch his feet.
And how should man or woman escaping get even the moment's grasp of that two-inch projection of stone? ”

“ For five hours on that memorable morning the American worked his way down the face of the precipice, moving cautiously from ledge to ledge, from one foot-hold to another, and, where there was none, breaking away the soft rock with his sharp-pointed hammer and a two-foot iron bar until he had a place to stand on. ”

“ They crowd all the roads, and camp under all the hedges and on all the scraps of common-land, and live among and upon the hops until they are all picked, and the hop-gardens, so beautiful through the summer, look as if they had been laid waste by an invading army. ”

“ Here, too, you see hop-gardens; looking more than a little bare in spring, but with plenty of work going on, chiefly in trimming and tarring the ends of the new ash-poles that are to be planted, thick as forests, for the hop-bines to grow upon. Here and there are the hutches in which the hop-pickers will live in August, and now and again you see an oast-house; the old buildings with their quaint outlines, the new apt to be eye-sorrows for angularity and sheer commonplace ugliness. ”

“ The red-striped convict never looked up when the garotter came to his loom, bearing the basket of shuttles. He stood with folded arms, his eyes upon the winding cylinder, almost at his feet, and his face was like a mask. It was like a mask of stone. And it expressed patience, a patience stony because infinite, a patience counting upon the future with absolute assurance. ”

“ As these child-hoppers increased in years, their power of leaping soon led them to see that they could advance much more rapidly by jumping than by the ancient, toilsome way of setting first one and then the other foot forward. ”

“ Some men had it; a hook was in its golden gills, and they had tied its tail to the hook so that it could not stir, and they had put it in a pail of water that it might not die too quickly, die ere they could sell it. ”

“ Whenever a thread of warp or whoof broke he had to retie it quickly; whenever the shuttle became bare, he dipped his hand into a basket kept filled by another convict and drew a new one, threading it into place. ”

“ He smiled too soon. The fourth step broke under his weight. His feet flew out from under him and his back struck the side of the hole. He slid the rest of the way, carrying with him an avalanche of dirt and pebbles. ”

“ He sat there long, too, this time. Thumps of bales, crashes of boxes, the grating of lighters against the launch's sides, a babel of voices, came to him, but he had no curiosity. The rhythmic clanking of the anchor-chain, hoisted up link by link through hawser, shook him at last out of his despairing torpor. He clambered aboard and squatted by the rudder-post. The boat was gathering headway. It glided as upon azure ice; palm-lined promontories were floating back slowly one by. one—but what the boy saw was the girl. ”

“ When a free shoot has grown far beyond its support, it sinks downwards from its weight, as already explained in the case of the Hop, with the revolving extremity turned upwards. If the support be not lofty, the shoot falls to the ground, and resting there, the extremity rises up. ”

“ The little body with its possible spark of life—this infinitesimal possibility which demanded of him such a stupendous sacrifice—could be dropped quietly into the river, to stream out there into the unfathomable secret of the bay. He could still wipe out the slate. And she would never know, she would never know!
She! He saw her as he had left her, in the garden, in the dewy morning. Her eyes were steadily upon him. “Enough! Enough!” he cried with a growl like that of a wild beast.
He passed along a crooked bridge, and at the end a big Metropolitan policeman stopped him with a question. ”

“ It was solitude with light; which is better than darkness. But anon, the sound of the mower's rifle was heard in the fields, and this, too, mingled with the lowing kine.
This part of our route lay through the country of hops, which plant perhaps supplies the want of the vine in American scenery, and may remind the traveller of Italy, and the South of France, whether he traverses the country when the hop-fields, as then, present solid and regular masses of verdure, hanging in graceful festoons from pole to pole; the cool coverts where lurk the gales which refresh the wayfarer ”

“ The wagon rolled slowly, with sudden creaking pitchings, along a dust-heaped road which coiled its way to the summit of a tawny hill. To the east, far down, white flecks danced upon the bay’s green waters, and from the shore breaths of wind came gliding up through the dry wild oats in long silvery undulations. ”

“ We sat on the edge of the bin, between the standing hops, while a pole-puller supplied us with great fragrant branches. In an hour’s time we became as expert as it is possible to become. As soon as the fingers became accustomed automatically to differentiate between hops and leaves and to strip half-a-dozen blossoms at a time there was no more to learn. ”

“ Or it would be at night when, standing at her darkened window, she heard the sound of hoofs reverberated in her heart, and he passed, a mere shadow, immediately swallowed in the gloom. Sometimes she remained at the window, peering into the darkness; at other times she withdrew in unreasoning timidity into the farther depths of the sala, and stood there, panting, till the hoof-beats had sunk into silence. ”

“ Although called "Jumpers," they only jump in a minority of the experiments, the word jumping really including all such phenomena as lifting the shoulders, raising the hands, striking, throwing, crying, and tumbling. Jumpers have been known to fall head over heels over an embankment on which they were sitting, on suddenly hearing the whistle of a locomotive ”

“ A hopper is an inverted cone, into which corn is put at a mill before it runs between the stones.
In advancing into the cavern, the avenue leads from the second hoppers, west, one mile; and thence, south-west, to the chief area or city, which is six miles from the entrance. This avenue, throughout its whole extent from the above station to the cross-roads, or chief area, is from sixty to one hundred feet in hight, of a similar width, and nearly on a level, the floor or bottom being covered with loose limestone and saltpeter earth. ”

“ Sometimes we glided along without perceptible motion, and at others jolted down bubbling rapids, the steersmen straining every nerve to keep their bark's head to the current, as she impatiently swerved from side to side in the eddies. ”

“ My first thought in the morning, when the level sun streaming through the hop vines brought me on the sudden wide awake—as a soldier should wake, slipping cleanly and completely out of his sleep-heaviness—my first thought, I say, was of a shadowed face vanishing into the night-glimmer, and something enchantingly mysterious to be sought for in this remote Acadian village. Then, remembering my business and hoping that my indiscretion had not muddled it, I resolutely put the folly from me and sprang up. ”

“ From the tubs, then, the line passes around the loggerhead, where the boatsteerer handles it, and snubs it as much as he wishes. It may be running out so fast as to burn his hands; and a swiftly running line not only burns the hands, but can take the very flesh off the bones, as I know to my sorrow. ”

“ He stretches himself taut, his hands, straight above him, clutching the sand, his toes digging into it, and spreads his wings in fans at his sides. The earth is there beneath him, in his embrace; he feels her strength flowing into his veins. ”