Sellers" as a fiction, an invention, an
extravagant impossibility, and did me the honor to call him a
"creation"; but they were mistaken. I merely put him on paper as he was;
he was not a person who could be exaggerated. The incidents which looked
most extravagant, both in the book and on the stage, were not inventions
of mine but were facts of his life; and I was present when they were
developed. John T. Raymond's audiences used to come near to dying with
laughter over the turnip-eating scene; but, extravagant as the scene
was, it was faithful to the facts, in all its absurd details. The thing
happened in Lampton's own house, and I was present. In fact I was myself
the guest who ate the turnips. In the hands of a great actor that
piteous scene would have dimmed any manly spectator's eyes with tears,
and racked his ribs apart with laughter at the same time. But Raymond
was great in humorous portrayal only. In that he was superb, he was
wonderful--in a word, great; in all things else he was a pigmy of the
pigmies.

The real Colonel Sellers, as I knew him in James Lampton, was a pathetic
and beautiful spirit, a manly man, a straight and honorable man, a man
with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be
loved; and he was loved by all his friends, and by his family
worshipped. It is the right word. To them he was but little less than a
god. The real Colonel Sellers was never on the stage. Only half of him
was there. Raymond could not play the other half of him; it was above
his level. That half was made up of qualities of which Raymond was
wholly destitute. For Raymond was not a manly man, he was not an
honorable man nor an honest one, he was empty and selfish and vulgar and
ignorant and silly, and there was a vacancy in him where his heart
should have been. There was only one man who could have played the whole
of Colonel Sellers, and that was Frank Mayo.[3]

It is a world of surprises. They fall, too, where one is least expecting
them. When I introduced Sellers into the book, Charles Dudley Warner,
who was writing the story with me, proposed a change of Seller's
Christian name. Ten years before, in a remote corner of the West, he had
come across a man named Eschol Sellers, and he thought that Eschol was
just the right and fitting name for our Sellers, since it was odd and
quaint and all that. I liked the idea, but I said that that man might
turn up and object. But Warner said it couldn't happen; tha