at all. But I'll tell you what: if you'll
put up $500, I'll put up $500 more; we'll bring our chap over here
and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy
won't be a marker to him."

It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he never
earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen
sometimes. The "Rightful Earl of Durham" continued to send letters for a
long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did not establish
his claim. No one but Mark Twain ever really got anything out of it.
Like the Tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for a book.
Colonel Watterson goes on to say that Clemens was only joking about
having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked
it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton family.

Another of Clemens's friends in London at this time was Prentice Mulford,
of California. In later years Mulford acquired a wide reputation for his
optimistic and practical psychologies. Through them he lifted himself
out of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend a helping hand to
others. His "White Cross Library" had a wide reading and a wide
influence; perhaps has to this day. But in 1873 Mulford had not found
the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding
it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming:

Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you
deserve to be. I can't ask this on the score of any past favors,
for there have been none. I have not always spoken of you in terms
of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due,
I suppose, in part to an envious spirit. I am simply human. Some
people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of
those more successful. I can't. They are divine; I am not.

It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge,
to get him a hearing for his work. He adds:

I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from
yours. Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I
shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right
service.... Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation. Certainly, if I
was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier
than ever I did before. I have occasionally thought of London
Bridge, but the Thames is now