er of us were born the two families on the maternal side had been
neighbors and friends. An uncle of his married an aunt of mine--the
children of this marriage cousins in common to us--albeit, this apart,
we were life-time cronies. He always contended that we were "bloodkin."

Notwithstanding that when Mark Twain appeared east of the Alleghanies
and north of the Blue Ridge he showed the weather-beating of the west,
the bizarre alike of the pilot house and the mining camp very much
in evidence, he came of decent people on both sides of the house. The
Clemens and the Lamptons were of good old English stock. Toward the
middle of the eighteenth century three younger scions of the Manor
of Durham migrated from the County of Durham to Virginia and thence
branched out into Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.

His mother was the loveliest old aristocrat with a taking drawl, a drawl
that was high-bred and patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which her
famous son inherited. All the women of that ilk were gentlewomen. The
literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had
percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets
and painters, unborn to the world of expression till he arrived upon the
scene.

These joint cousins of ours embraced an exceedingly large, varied and
picturesque assortment. Their idiosyncrasies were a constant source of
amusement to us. Just after the successful production of his play, The
Gilded Age, and the uproarious hit of the comedian, Raymond, in the
leading role, I received a letter from him in which he told me he had
made in Colonel Mulberry Sellers a close study of one of these kinsmen
and thought he had drawn him to the life. "But for the love o' God," he
said, "don't whisper it, for he would never understand or forgive me, if
he did not thrash me on sight."

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money-making, he would have withdrawn it from the stage as, in a fit of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 intimati