Appeared like he couldn't bring himself down to toil.
"Then one day he got his hands on a paper that had come acrost in a ship from England.

He was readin' it, settin' in the shade; my grandfather said he always noticed he was partial to the shade, and his wife was pesterin' of him fo' to go and plow out his truck-patch, when, all at once, he lit on something in the paper, and he started up and let out a yell like he'd been shot.

'By gum, I'm the Earl of Lambeth!' he says, and took out to the nearest tavern and got b'ilin' full.

Afterward he showed 'em the paper and they seen with their own eyes where Richard Keppel Cavendish, Earl of Lambeth, had died in London.

My great grandfather told 'em that was his uncle; that when he left home there was several cousins--which was printed in the paper, too--but they'd up and died, so the title naturally come to him.
"Well, sir, that was the first the family ever knowed of it, and then they seen what it was he'd meant when he throwed out them hints about bein' a heap better than he seemed.