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Updated: May 1, 2025
They are a very hardworking, but, it must be confessed, a very low class, dirty people. Though many of the Chinamen give up their native dress and adopt the European costume, more particularly the billycock hat, there is one part of their belongings that they do not part with even in the last extremity and that is their tail.
Bolton is a plain, dark-complexioned, clear-headed man rather clerical in look; well-built; married; about 38 years of age; fond of a billycock; teetotal, but averse to drowning other people with water; doesn't think it sinful to smoke just one pipe of tobacco after he has done a day's work; had rather visit poor than rich people; dislikes namby-pambying and making a greater fuss over high than low class members of his church; thinks that those in poverty need most looking after, and that those with good homes and decent purses should try to look a little after themselves; believes in working hard; cares precious little for deacons we rather like that, for deacons are queer birds to encounter; is original in thought, fairly up in theology, and straightforward in language.
Then I turned to Ben, who had always bullied us both. Dropping the solemn "thou's" which our elders still used, I let him have plain "you's." "You you mean coward! I've a mind to knock you into the sea!" "Grow bigger first, little billycock," taunts Ben. By the next day I was big enough.
The young man in the billycock, who did not seem to be gifted with any tact in dealing with people beyond the general idea of clutching hold of their coats, stood outside the door, as dazed as if he had been thrown out bodily, and silently watched the other three walk away together through the garden. "That was a sound, spanking lie I told just now," remarked the medical man, laughing.
Clean-shaven, with a short bulldog pipe in the corner of his mouth, a billycock hat set rather jauntily on his head, a short, drab-coloured overcoat of horsy cut, black and white check trousers, red-skin riding gloves, square-toed walking shoes, a light cane, and a rose in his buttonhole; you would have taken him at first sight for a sporting tipster.
The women affect parti-coloured petticoats of home-made baize or woollen stuff, dyed blue, scarlet, brown, or orange; a scalloped cape of the same material bound with some contrasting hue; and a white or coloured head-kerchief, sometimes topped by the carapuca, but rarely by the vulgar 'billycock' of the Canaries.
When the present enthusiast for the splendid subject of hats was a small boy it was the ambition of every small boy of his acquaintance to be regarded as of sufficient age to possess what we termed a "dice hat," what is commonly called a "derby," what in England they call a "darby," what Dickens aptly referred to as a "pot-hat," what, in one highly diverting form, is sometimes referred to on the other side as a "billycock."
A boy slipped into the Paddock and began to bet surreptitiously behind the dressing-tent. He was fair, slight, and horsey. His stiff, tight choker, his horse-shoe pin, the cut of his breeches, his alert and wary air of a man of the world, all betrayed the racing-lad. From the corner of his mouth hung a cigarette waggishly a-rake; and his billycock had just the correct and knowing cock.
It was a gusty night, as you will remember, and this morning, as I was leaving the house, the butler next door called to me and gave me this; he had found it lying in the balcony of his house." He opened the bandbox with a flourish, and brought forth a rather shabby billycock hat.
Once I remember seeing a squatting, life-size heathen idol hoisted from a vessel's hold and deposited on a sugar-box on a New York quay. Some ribald passer-by put a battered felt hat upon Vishnu's sacred curls, and there the poor image sat, an alien in an indifferent land, a sack across its shoulders, a "billycock" upon its head, and honoured at most with a passing stare.
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