Chapters from My Autobiography | Page 4

Mark Twain
kept his title
perfect. He had always said that the land would not become valuable in
his time, but that it would be a commodious provision for his children
some day. It contained coal, copper, iron and timber, and he said that in
the course of time railways would pierce to that region, and then the
property would be property in fact as well as in name. It also produced
a wild grape of a promising sort. He had sent some samples to Nicholas
Longworth, of Cincinnati, to get his judgment upon them, and Mr.

Longworth had said that they would make as good wine as his
Catawbas. The land contained all these riches; and also oil, but my
father did not know that, and of course in those early days he would
have cared nothing about it if he had known it. The oil was not
discovered until about 1895. I wish I owned a couple of acres of the
land now. In which case I would not be writing Autobiographies for a
living. My father's dying charge was, "Cling to the land and wait; let
nothing beguile it away from you." My mother's favorite cousin, James
Lampton, who figures in the "Gilded Age" as "Colonel Sellers," always
said of that land--and said it with blazing enthusiasm, too,--"There's
millions in it--millions!" It is true that he always said that about
everything--and was always mistaken, too; but this time he was right;
which shows that a man who goes around with a prophecy-gun ought
never to get discouraged; if he will keep up his heart and fire at
everything he sees, he is bound to hit something by and by.
Many persons regarded "Colonel 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; that he
was doubtless dead by this time, a man with a name like that couldn't
live long; and be he dead or alive we must have the name, it was
exactly the right one and we couldn't do without it. So the change was
made. Warner's man was a farmer in a cheap
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