Part 8 (1/2)

”He touched me for a tenner the first tihed it up and have been coughing theularity”

The ”Earl” was indeed a terror, especially when he had been drinking

His belief in his peerage was as absolute as Colonel Sellers' in his et over there” and ”state his case” During the Tichborne trial Mark Twain and I were in London, and one day he said to ated this Durha to it The Lamptons passed out of the De before dissipated the estates

Whatever the title, it lapsed The present earldom is a new creation, not the same family at all But, I tell you what, if you'll put up five hundred dollars I'll put up five hundred more, we'll fetch our chap across and set him in as a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy won't be a marker to hi he wrote a novel and called it The Claih I never told him so, that I could not enjoy Many years after, I happened to see upon a hotel register in Rome these entries: ”The Earl of Durha just below it, ”Lady Anne Lainald Lambton” So the Lambtons--they spelled it with a b instead of a p--were yet in the peerage A Lambton was Earl of Durham The next time I saw Mark I rated hi about its being necessary to perfect the joke

”Did you ever meet this present peer and possible usurper?” I asked

”No,” he answered, ”I never did, but if he had called on me, I would have had him come up”

III

Hiswith my family at 103 Mount Street Between 103 and 102 there was the parochial workhouse, quite a long and i, I found a letter he had written on the sitting-room table He had left it with his card He spoke of the shock he had received upon finding that next to 102--presumably 103--was the workhouse He had lovedthe fa--but the ”work'us,”

that was beyond hih pages of horseplay; his relief on ascertaining the truth and learning hiswith a dinner invitation

It was at Geneva, Switzerland, that I received a long, overflowing letter, full of flamboyant oddities, written froram ”Burn letter Blot it from your memory

Susie is dead”

How much of melancholy lay hidden behind the riefs were tempered by a vein of stoicism He was a medley of contradictions Unconventional to the point of eccentricity, his sense of his proper dignity was sound and sufficient Though lavish in the use of money, he had a full realization of its value and made close contracts for his work Like Sellers, his mind soared when it sailed financial currents He lacked acute business judgs, while an excellent econoe was the ot the woman of all the world he most needed, a truly lovely and wise helpht while she lived She was the best of housewives and mothers, and the safest of counsellors and critics She knew his worth; she appreciated his genius; she understood his lirievous disaster as well as a staggering blow He never wholly recovered from it

IV

It was in the early seventies that Mark Twain dropped into New York, where there was already gathered a congenial group toold Jack Dade's description of hih aspirations and peregrinations”

It radiated between Franklin Square, where Joseph W Harper--”Joe Brooklyn,” we called hined in place of his uncle, Fletcher Harper, the inal Harper Brothers, and the Lotos Club, then in Irving Place, and Delmonico's, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, with Sutherland's in Liberty Street for a don place of luncheon resort, not to forget Dorlon's in Fulton Market

[Illustration: General Leonidas Polk--Lieutenant General CSA--Killed in Georgia June 14, 1864--PE Bishop of Louisiana]

The Harper contingent, beside its chief, embraced To namen of letters,” a very apt phrase appropriated froiant, who looked like a dragoon and not a book froh publishers Bret Harte had but newly arrived froh still subordinate to Greeley, was beginning to h priest to the revels Occasionally I htful shrine

Truth to tell, it eh all of us had literary leanings of one sort and another, especially late at night; and Safield and Murat Halstead fro, living in Boston, held hih account; but often we had Joseph Jefferson, then in the heyday of his career, with once in a while Edwin Booth, who could not quite trust hiht from oversea were innumerable, from the elder Sothern and Sala and Yates to Lord Dufferin and Lord Houghton Times went very well those days, and whilst some looked on askance, notably Curtis and, rather oddly, Stedand hearty, ranging fro capabilities both for work and play, and I cannot recall that any hurt to any of us cah robustious, our fribbles were harh--ebullitions of anih each shade, treading the Celestian way, asto those Noctes Aht e'en repeat to the other the words on a memorable occasion addressed by Curran to Lord Avonmore:

_”We spent them not in toys or lust or wine; But search of deep philosophy, Wit, eloquence and poesy-- Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine”_