“I have heard it seriously asserted of me that I am a great pugilist! and very far in conduct and manners from what one might expect, and so forth.  Now it has just come to my knowledge that a sporting publican and dog-fancier, who called his public-house in the Waterloo Road ’The Greyhound’ (my crest), and has my name over the lintel, has claimed to be the author, and is supposed to be myself!  Mr. Payne (my publisher) told me about the ‘pugilist,’ and said he had heard it in the clubs that I was a match for Sayers,—­as I conclude my sporting namesake is.”  In America, too, I found that my double lived at Hardwick, Worcester Co., N.Y., and that another Martin hailed from Buffalo.  So, like poor Edgar Poe, who had to suffer from the machinations of a profligate brother, who gave Edgar’s name whenever he got into a scrape, I may have sometimes been credited with the sins of strangers.  No one is free from this sort of calumny.  We all have heard of Sheridan’s wicked witticism, in that when taken up in Pall Mall for drunkenness, he gave his name Wilberforce; and it is said that he got drunk on purpose to say so!  My venerable friend, Thomas Cooper, the pious and eloquent old Chartist, has been similarly confused with Robert Cooper, the atheist, lecturer; not but that Thomas had once been an atheist too.  In this connection, here is a curiously complicated case of alibi, which I abstract verbatim from one of my Archive-books.

“On Sunday, the 17th of September 1848, I was all the afternoon and evening at my house on Furze Hill, Brighton, quietly reading and teaching my children, &c.  Next day the ’Rev. J.C.  Richmond (an American friend) called with me on the Rev. Mr. Vaughan, and in the course of conversation the latter said to me in a good-natured tone of rebuke:  ’Some of my congregation tell me they saw you yesterday afternoon smoking a cigar in a fly on the Marine Parade.’  I had hardly time to deny the soft impeachment, which I might well have done with emphasis, as a loather of cigars, and as little as possible a traveller on Sundays, when Richmond broke out with ’That’s impossible; for I saw him myself in Shoreham Church (five miles distant), and noticed that he went away in the middle of the sermon, as I supposed, to get home to Mrs. Tupper.’  Mr. Richmond says he could have made oath that I had been there, and that he told several persons after church that I ’had heard part of the sermon in the afternoon.’  So, upon human and trustworthy evidence, I could have been proved to have been in three places at once.”

My fetch similarly once rescued a young lady from death on Snowdon:  at least a stranger in company once came up to me, to thank me for my prowess in having stopped his daughter’s pony, which had run away down, the mountain!—­in vain I denied it:—­and he addressed me by my name, too!  Somebody must have given him my card by accident.