The admirable meal concluded I was taken a little walk about the place. The estate had once been devoted to hops, and the back premises of the solid old stone house were encircled by a great wall, broken with the hooded peaks of kilns and lined with immense warehouses, where the crops of the fields used to be treated and stored. Now the kilns were cold and out of gear; the granaries were stores for fruit and ladders and market baskets; and the bulk of the fifty acres of land bore orchards in heavy bearing. I had struck a Kentish fruit farm at apple harvest, which was a sight to see. Waggons were all day loading and driving off with their piles of cases for Covent Garden, yet the army of pickers seemed to make little impression upon the apparently countless millions of apples still rosily shining in the sun. Other fruits were grown, although not to the same extent, and there were lanes and thickets of cob-nut, which I was told is a very profitable commodity, if you have it, but the bushes had failed to bear that season. In view of the growing popularity of vegetarianism, to the charms of which I yielded myself in England, when I found how satisfactorily you could be fed by those who knew how to work the system properly, I advised the sister fruit-farmers to make more of a point of nuts; this was when they mourned sadly over the market price of apples in a good year. I told them how I had spent a week with vegetarians, expecting to be starved, and had been nourished on such rich non-flesh meats that I hardly cared to look at a boiled chicken when I went on to the next house. "Nuts," said I, "that can give you all the feeling of beef and mutton without the gross actuality, have a great future before them. So make haste and start growing them before the other fruit-farmers think of it."
The conformation of this Kentish orchard gave charming views of its several parts, of the pretty, down-dropping village and the distant landscape. There was a slope of applefield, flushed with the colour of its massed fruit in the sun, which sank to a lake with swans on it, on the far side of which an old mill dipped its wheel in the water; trees rose steeply behind the mill, and sweet old houses out of the trees. It was the top of hilly ridges of which the bottom was the famous Weald--and a subject for a painter if ever there was one. When I had walked about enough I visited the warehouses and hop kilns that walled the yard; saw F. wading in her sea of graded apples, directing the workmen whose only overseer she was; stood with C. in an empty oast house, while she reconstructed the busy scenes that were no more, the living functions of the idle furnace and flue, shoot and press, and told tales of a childhood beginning to loom away towards the fairyland where now my own abides. "We used to bring potatoes here, and the hop-dryer would bake them for us in the hot ashes"--alas! But why should I say alas? I am convinced--although I was not always convinced--that it is not a matter for repining that we "live but once."