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Updated: July 7, 2025
By keeping his head covered with hay and slowly raising it, he was safe to take a look around. It was a bright, sunny morning. The hay-cock, or thistle-cock, was one of several that had been rejected.
A pollard willow was noticed with a crew of about twenty land rats, which had found refuge there until the tree itself was lifted by the rising water and carried down the stream; and a floating hay-cock supported a man's jacket, his jar of cider, and his "shuppick."
A variety is procured among the scrubs under a singular pile or nest which they make of sticks, in the shape of a hay-cock, three or four feet high and many feet in circumference. A great many occupy the same pile and are killed with sticks as they run out. Snakes, lizards and other reptiles are procured among the rocks or in the scrubs.
In England the fashion had been set in 1614, by the Characters of Sir Thomas Overbury, who died by poison the year before his book was printed. One of Overbury's sketches the Fair and Happy Milkmaid is justly celebrated for its old-world sweetness and quaintness. "Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made hay-cock.
The height of this rock could scarcely equal six feet, and, as has been said, its shape was not unlike that which is usually given to beehives, or to a hay-cock. The latter, indeed, gives the best idea not only of its form, but of its dimensions.
And if the weather be cold and raw, Then in a barn we tumble on straw. If warm and fair, by yea-cock and nay-cock, The fields will afford us a hedge or a hay-cock.
At the sound of a horn like the English harvest horn, the pitchers, the loaders, and every labourer on the spot, left their work, and collected around some tree or hay-cock, to receive their noon refreshment. The indispensable fiddle was never wanting.
I had forgotten to mention, that the tree or hay-cock, the appointed place of refreshment, was distinguished by pennants of different coloured ribbons attached to a stick as a flag-staff, and which waving in the wind, under a beautiful midsummer sky, had an effect peculiarly pleasing. As I saw the same spectacle in several fields, I believe it to be national.
One thing or another was floating by every quarter of an hour, which it would be worth while to seize and bring home. As Roger saw, now a hay-cock, and now a man's hat, float by, he worked harder and harder, that as few treasures as possible might be thus lost. Oliver felt much in the same way, particularly from his want of a hat or cap.
As I had my coat and waistcoat off, and was not in a state to receive visitors, I got behind a newly-made hay-cock and watched the vehicle until it came to a bend in the avenue where there is a clump of trees which obscured it from my view.
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