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Updated: May 1, 2025
Trotter still wore tights, with hobnailed boots to walk in and a rusty billycock hat for shelter to his head. He somewhat clung to this garb, though his tumbling days were over. One had only to look at his bloated, pouchy face to see how drink and sloth had fouled his joints and slacked his muscles.
He wore a white tie, and his coat and waistcoat were of clerical cut. On the table was a pair of gold spectacles and on the sideboard a soft billycock hat. He looked the not-too-well-off country parson to the life.
It was one of those head-gears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton nightcap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile's face.
Pickard, who had been nervously fingering a white billycock hat, now put it down on the floor and thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers as if to keep them safe while he talked. "It's like this here," he answered.
The toilette is not becoming: here the shawl takes the place of the mantilla, and the head-covering, as in Tenerife, is capped by the hideous billycock. But the jarvey, like the bath-man, the barber, and generally the body-servant and the menial classes which wait upon man's person, are not always models of civility.
Moreover his appearance was conspicuous, his white billycock, his glasses, his light grey suit, his rosette of the Legion of Honour, his many characteristic gestures all attracted attention. If anything was to be done he must begin by Anglicising his appearance.
'No; here he is, replied he, pointing to a tall, powerful young fellow, whose tweed suit and billycock hat could not completely conceal a soldierlike bearing and a sort of compactness that comes of 'drill. 'That's my name. What do you want with me? cried he, in a loud but pleasant voice.
Rapt and prophetic, his plump hands clasped round the handle of his umbrella, his billycock hat a trifle askew, this irascible little man of the Voice, this impatient dreamer, this scolding Optimist, who has argued so rudely and dogmatically about economics and philosophy and decoration, and indeed about everything under the sun, who has been so hard on the botanist and fashionable women, and so reluctant in the matter of beer, is carried onward, dreaming dreams, dreams that with all the inevitable ironies of difference, may be realities when you and I are dreams.
On the other hand, if the billycock had come privately and naturally into Ely Cathedral, no enthusiast for Gothic harmony would think of objecting to the billycock so long, of course, as it was not worn on the head. But there is indeed a much deeper objection to this theory of the two incompatible excellences of antiquity and popularity.
"No 'e ain't there," returned the prize-fighter; "I've bin all over it looked under the bed, into the cupboard, through the key'ole; p'r'aps," he added, turning quickly, "'e may be up the chimbly!" The expression on poor Mrs Butt's face now alarmed Charlie, who instantly doffed his billycock and resumed his natural voice and manner.
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