twenty-five pounds annually to the hunt, which entitled him to feel
quite at home in his red coat. He generally owned a racing colt or
two, and attended meetings; but was supposed to know what he was
about, and to have kept safely the five or six thousand pounds
which his father had left him. And his farming was well done; for
though he was, out-and-out, a gentleman-farmer, he knew how to get
the full worth in work done for the fourteen shillings a week which
he paid to his labourers,--a deficiency in which knowledge is the
cause why gentlemen in general find farming so expensive an
amusement. He was a handsome, good-looking man of about thirty, and
would have been a happy man had he not been too ambitious in his
aspirations after gentry. He had been at school for three years at
Cheltenham College, which, together with his money and appearance
and undoubted freehold property, should, he thought, have made his
position quite secure to him; but, though he sometimes called young
Hampton of Hampton Wick "Hampton," and the son of the rector of
Dillsborough "Mainwaring," and always called the rich young brewers
from Norrington "Botsey,"--partners in the well-known firm of
Billbrook & Botsey; and though they in return called him "Larry"
and admitted the intimacy, still he did not get into their houses.
And Lord Rufford, when he came into the neighbourhood, never asked
him to dine at the Bush. And--worst of all,--some of the sporting
men and others in the neighbourhood, who decidedly were not
gentlemen, also called him "Larry." Mr. Runciman always did so.
Twenty or twenty-five years ago Runciman had been his father's
special friend, before the house had been built and before the days
at Cheltenham College. Remembering this Lawrence was too good a
fellow to rebuke Runciman; but to younger men of that class he
would sometimes make himself objectionable. There was another
keeper of hunting stables, a younger man, named Stubbings, living