t 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 and humble way. When the book had
been out a week, a college-bred gentleman of courtly manners and ducal
upholstery arrived in Hartford in a sultry state of mind and with a
libel suit in his eye, and _his_ name was Eschol Sellers! He had never
heard of the other one, and had never been within a thousand miles of
him. This damaged aristocrat's programme was quite definite and
businesslike: the American Publishing Company must suppress the edition
as far as printed, and change the name in the plates, or stand a suit
for $10,000. He carried away the Company's promise and many apologies,
and we changed the name back to Colonel Mulberry Sellers, in the plates.
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen. Even the existence of
two unrelated men wearing the impossible name of Eschol Sellers is a
possible thing.

James Lampton floated, all his days, in a tinted mist of magnificent
dreams, and died at last without seeing one of them realized. I saw him
last in 1884, when it had been twenty-six years since I ate the basin of
raw turnips and washed them down with a bucket of water in his house. He
was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old
breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail
wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart,
the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all
there; and before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin's
lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. I said to
myself, "I did not overdraw him by a shade, I set him down as he was;
and he is the same man to-day. Cable will recognize him." I asked him to
excuse me a moment, and ran into the next room, which was Cable's; Cable
and I were stumping the Union on a reading tour. I said--

"I am going to leave your door open, so that you can listen. There is a
man in there who is interesting."

I went back and asked Lampton what he was doing now. He began to tell me
of a "small venture" he had begun in New Mexico through his son; "only a
little thing--a mere trifle--partly to amuse my leisure, partly to keep
my capital from lying idle, but mainly to develop the boy--develop the
boy