The pathos of the part, and not its comic aspects, had most impressed him. He designed and wrote it for Edwin Booth. From the first and always he was disgusted by the Raymond portrayal. Except for its popularity and money-making, he would have withdrawn it from the stage as, in a fit of pique, Raymond himself did while it was still packing the theaters.
The original Sellers had partly brought him up and had been very good to him. A second Don Quixote in appearance and not unlike the knight of La Mancha in character, it would have been safe for nobody to laugh at James Lampton, or by the slightest intimation, look or gesture to treat him with inconsideration, or any proposal of his, however preposterous, with levity.
He once came to visit me upon a public occasion and during a function. I knew that I must introduce him, and with all possible ceremony, to my colleagues. He was very queer; tall and peaked, wearing a black, swallow-tailed suit, shiny with age, and a silk hat, bound with black crepe to conceal its rustiness, not to indicate a recent death; but his linen as spotless as new-fallen snow. I had my fears. Happily the company, quite dazed by the apparition, proved decorous to solemnity, and the kind old gentleman, pleased with himself and proud of his "distinguished young kinsman," went away highly gratified.
Not long after this one of his daughters--pretty girls they were, too, and in charm altogether worthy of their Cousin Sam Clemens--was to be married, and Sellers wrote me a stately summons, all-embracing, though stiff and formal, such as a baron of the Middle Ages might have indited to his noble relative, the field marshal, bidding him bring his good lady and his retinue and abide within the castle until the festivities were ended, though in this instance the castle was a suburban cottage scarcely big enough to accommodate the bridal couple. I showed the bombastic but hospitable and genuine invitation to the actor Raymond, who chanced to be playing in Louisville when it reached me. He read it through with care and reread it.
"Do you know," said he, "it makes me want to cry. That is not the man I am trying to impersonate at all."
Be sure it was not; for there was nothing funny about the spiritual being of Mark Twain's Colonel Mulberry Sellers; he was as brave as a lion and as upright as Sam Clemens himself.
When a very young man, living in a woodland cabin down in the Pennyrile region of Kentucky, with a wife he adored and two or three small children, he was so carried away by an unexpected windfall that he lingered overlong in the nearby village, dispensing a royal hospitality; in point of fact, he "got on a spree." Two or three days passed before he regained possession of himself. When at last he reached home, he found his wife ill in bed and the children nearly starved for lack of food. He said never a word, but walked out of the cabin, tied himself to a tree, and was wildly horsewhipping himself when the cries of the frightened family summoned the neighbors and he was brought to reason. He never touched an intoxicating drop from that day to his death.
II
Another one of our fantastic mutual cousins was the "Earl of Durham." I ought to say that Mark Twain and I grew up on old wives' tales of estates and titles, which, maybe due to a kindred sense of humor in both of us, we treated with shocking irreverence. It happened some fifty years ago that there turned up, first upon the plains and afterward in New York and Washington, a lineal descendant of the oldest of the Virginia Lamptons--he had somehow gotten hold of or had fabricated a bundle of documents--who was what a certain famous American would have called a "corker." He wore a sombrero with a rattlesnake for a band, and a belt with a couple of six-shooters, and described himself and claimed to be the Earl of Durham.
"He touched me for a tenner the first time I ever saw him," drawled Mark to me, "and I coughed it up and have been coughing them up, whenever he's around, with punctuality and regularity."