Page:London - The People of the Abyss.djvu/215

Rh 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 Barham 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, certainly; 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 calculates his loss at £8000;" "Mr. Fremlin, of brewery fame, who rents all the land in this parish, loses £10,000;" 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 Buggles, and underfed Mrs. Buggles, and the underfed Buggles kiddies, was a greater tragedy than the £10,000 lost by Mr. Fremlin. And in addition, underfed William Buggles' tragedy might be multiplied by thousands where Mr. Fremlin's could not be multiplied by five.

To see how William Buggles and his kind fared,