and was
satisfied.

Among the Virginian Clemenses were Jere. (already mentioned), and
Sherrard. Jere. Clemens had a wide reputation as a good pistol-shot, and
once it enabled him to get on the friendly side of some drummers when
they wouldn't have paid any attention to mere smooth words and
arguments. He was out stumping the State at the time. The drummers were
grouped in front of the stand, and had been hired by the opposition to
drum while he made his speech. When he was ready to begin, he got out
his revolver and laid it before him, and said in his soft, silky way--

"I do not wish to hurt anybody, and shall try not to; but I have got
just a bullet apiece for those six drums, and if you should want to play
on them, don't stand behind them."

Sherrard Clemens was a Republican Congressman from West Virginia in the
war days, and then went out to St. Louis, where the James Clemens branch
lived, and still lives, and there he became a warm rebel. This was after
the war. At the time that he was a Republican I was a rebel; but by the
time he had become a rebel I was become (temporarily) a Republican. The
Clemenses have always done the best they could to keep the political
balances level, no matter how much it might inconvenience them. I did
not know what had become of Sherrard Clemens; but once I introduced
Senator Hawley to a Republican mass meeting in New England, and then I
got a bitter letter from Sherrard from St. Louis. He said that the
Republicans of the North--no, the "mudsills of the North"--had swept
away the old aristocracy of the South with fire and sword, and it ill
became me, an aristocrat by blood, to train with that kind of swine. Did
I forget that I was a Lambton?

That was a reference to my mother's side of the house. As I have already
said, she was a Lambton--Lambton with a p, for some of the American
Lamptons could not spell very well in early times, and so the name
suffered at their hands. She was a native of Kentucky, and married my
father in Lexington in 1823, when she was twenty years old and he
twenty-four. Neither of them had an overplus of property. She brought
him two or three negroes, but nothing else, I think. They removed to the
remote and secluded village of Jamestown, in the mountain solitudes of
east Tennessee. There their first crop of children was born, but as I
was of a later vintage I do not remember anything about it. I was
postponed--postponed to Missouri. Missouri was an unknown n