I passed through Teston and East and West
Farleigh shortly after the storm, and listened to
the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hops
rotting on the ground. At the hothouses of Bar-
ham Court, thirty thousand panes of glass had been
broken by the hail, while peaches, plums, pears,
apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds, everything,
had been pounded to pieces and torn to shreds.

All of which was too bad for the owners, cer
tainly; but at the worst, not one of them, for one
meal, would have to go short of food or drink. Yet
it was to them that the newspapers devoted columns
of sympathy, their pecuniary losses being detailed
at harrowing length. " Mr. Herbert Leney calcu
lates his loss at ??8000; " " Mr. Fremlin, of brewery
fame, who rents all the land in this parish, loses
;io,ooo;" and "Mr. Leney, the Wateringbury
brewer, brother to Mr. Herbert Leney, is another
heavy loser." As for the hoppers, they did not
count. Yet I venture to assert that the several
almost square meals lost by underfed William
Buggies, and underfed Mrs. Buggies, and the
underfed Buggies kiddies, was a greater tragedy
than the 10,000 lost by Mr. Fremlin. And in
addition, underfed William Buggies tragedy might
be multiplied by thousands where Mr. Fremlin s
could not be multiplied by five.

To see how William Buggies and his kind fared,

[[171]]

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v?