And there were in the country round sundry yeomen, as they ought to be called,—­gentlemen-farmers as they now like to style themselves,—­men who owned some acres of land, and farmed these acres themselves.  Of these we may specially mention Mr. Lawrence Twentyman, who was quite the gentleman-farmer.  He possessed over three hundred acres of land, on which his father had built an excellent house.  The present Mr. Twentyman, Lawrence Twentyman, Esquire, as he was called by everybody, was by no means unpopular in the neighbourhood.  He not only rode well to hounds but paid 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 at Stanton Corner, a great hunting rendezvous about four miles from Dillsborough; and not long since Twentyman had threatened to lay his whip across Stubbings’ shoulders if Stubbings ever called him “Larry” again.  Stubbings, who was a little man and rode races, only laughed at Mr. Twentyman who was six feet high, and told the story round to all the hunt.  Mr. Twentyman was more laughed at than perhaps he deserved.  A man should not have his Christian name used by every Tom and Dick without his sanction.  But the difficulty is one to which men in the position of Mr. Lawrence Twentyman are often subject.