Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 2.djvu/231

 not being so well calculated for their growth as the wheat-lands.

About three thousand persons, principally women and children, from the manufacturing districts of Staffordshire, pass over the Severn, about the middle of September, to pick the hops. They are paid about eight-pence a-day, and have their breakfasts found them. In drying the hops, cokes, made from sulphurous coals, are preferred. The great inducement which brings so many individuals so far from home, is to get apples; it may be fairly calculated that each person consumes or takes away two pots or ten pecks of fruit. Some of the pear trees are very large, and will produce forty pots of fruit, which will make two hogsheads of perry. Great quantities of apples are, some years, sent by the boats into the manufacturing districts. In the year 1791, at least three thousand tons were sent; many of them, however, came out of Gloucestershire; the cost of their carriage from Stourport to Manchester would be about £4000. Good fruit, for baking, was then worth ten shillings pot, and the best table fruit from fifteen to twenty shillings. The price is now from two to five shillings. When the price is low, the apples are ground for cider, but there is much less demand for fruit to go to the north than formerly. Except upon the farms where it is made, cider is not the common beverage; in the towns beer is drank as in other parts of the kingdom. The cider will produce intoxication when it is very imperfectly fermented, and, even at the mill, the persons employed in making it are drunk for weeks together. The cider is, occasionally, impregnated with