Now upon his lordship’s vast estates was a most unmitigated block-head called Imperial John, from his growing one of those chin appendages. His real name was Hybrid—John Hybrid, of Barley Hill Farm; but his handsome sister, “Imperial Jane,” as the wags called her, having attracted his lordship’s attention, to the danger as it was thought of old Binks, on leaving her furnishing seminary at Turnham Green, John had been taken by the hand, which caused him to lose his head, and make him set up for what he called “a gent.” He built a lodge and a portico to Barley Hill Farm, rough cast, and put a pine roof on to the house, and then advertised in the “Featherbedfordshire Gazette,” that letters and papers were for the future to be addressed to John Hybrid, Esquire, Barley Hill Hall, and not Farm as they had hitherto been. And having done so much for the place, John next revised his own person, which, though not unsightly, was coarse, and a long way off looking anything like that of a gentleman. He first started the imperial aforesaid, and not being laughed at as much as he expected for that, he was emboldened to order a red coat for the then approaching season. Mounting the pink is a critical thing, for if a man does not land in the front rank they will not admit him again into the rear, and he remains a sort of red bat for the rest of his life,—neither a gentleman nor a farmer. John, however, feeling that he had his lordship’s countenance, went boldly at it, and the first day of the season before that with which we are dealing, found him with his stomach buttoned consequentially up in a spic and span scarlet with fancy buttons, looking as bumptious as a man with a large balance at his banker’s. He sat bolt upright, holding his whip like a field-marshal’s bâton, on his ill-groomed horse, with a tight-bearing rein chucking the Imperial chin well in the air, and a sort of half-defiant “you’d better not laugh at me” look. And John was always proud to break a fence, or turn a hound, or hold a horse, or do anything his lordship bid him, and became a sort of hunting aide-de-camp to the great man. He was a boasting, bragging fool, always talking about m-o-y hall, and m-o-y lodge, and m-o-y plate in m-o-y drawing-room, for he had not discovered that plate was the appendage of a dining-room, and altogether he was very magnificent.