“Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after being out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and tell yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them, but Stoddard would lie there on the couch and snore.  Otherwise, as a secretary, he was perfect.”

The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain.—­[In a letter of this period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant’s “Evenings.”] —­He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and Stoddard day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of that now forgotten farce.  The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the claimant in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the earldom of Durham.  This American claimant was a distant cousin, who had “somehow gotten hold of, or had fabricated a full set of documents.”

Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection), adds: 

During the Tichborne trial Mark 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 is nothing to it.  The Lamptons passed out of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago.  There were never any estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation, not in the same family 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: