That is not the man I am trying to impersonate at all." Be sure it was not; for there was nothing funny about the spiritual being of Mark Twain's Colonel Mulberry Sellers; he was as brave as a lion and as upright as Sam Clemens himself.
When a very young man, living in a woodland cabin down in the Pennyrile region of Kentucky, with a wife he adored and two or three small children, he was so carried away by an unexpected windfall that he lingered overlong in the nearby village, dispensing a royal hospitality; in point of fact, he "got on a spree." Two or three days passed before he regained possession of himself.

When at last he reached home, he found his wife ill in bed and the children nearly starved for lack of food.

He said never a word, but walked out of the cabin, tied himself to a tree, and was wildly horsewhipping himself when the cries of the frightened family summoned the neighbors and he was brought to reason.
He never touched an intoxicating drop from that day to his death.
II Another one of our fantastic mutual cousins was the "Earl of Durham." I ought to say that Mark Twain and I grew up on old wives' tales of estates and titles, which, maybe due to a kindred sense of humor in both of us, we treated with shocking irreverence.

It happened some fifty years ago that there turned up, first upon the plains and afterward in New York and Washington, a lineal descendant of the oldest of the Virginia Lamptons--he had somehow gotten hold of or had fabricated a bundle of documents--who was what a certain famous American would have called a "corker." He wore a sombrero with a rattlesnake for a band, and a belt with a couple of six-shooters, and described himself and claimed to be the Earl of Durham.
"He touched me for a tenner the first time I ever saw him," drawled Mark to me, "and I coughed it up and have been coughing them up, whenever he's around, with punctuality and regularity." 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 millions.

All he wanted was money enough "to get over there" and "state his case." During the Tichborne trial Mark Twain and I were in London, and one day he said to me: "I have investigated this Durham business down at the Herald's office.
There's nothing to it.