I declined.  I said I didn’t want anything more to do with wildcat speculation.  Then he [Bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five.  I said I didn’t want it at any price.  He became eager; insisted that I take five hundred dollars’ worth.  He said he would sell me as much as I wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug hat; said I could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars.  But I was the burnt child, and I resisted all these temptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact, and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later.

About the end of the year I put up a telephone wire from my house down to the Courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first one that was ever used in a private house in the world.

That had been only a little while before he sailed for Europe.  When he returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest in the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage.

He had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend Dan Slote got hold of a new process for engraving—­the kaolatype or “chalk-plate” process—­which was going to revolutionize the world of illustration, he promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was satisfied with nothing short of control.  It was an ingenious process:  a sheet of perfectly smooth steel was coated with a preparation of kaolin (or china clay), and a picture was engraved through the coating down to the steel surface.  This formed the matrix into which the molten metal was poured to make the stereotype plate, or die, for printing.  It was Clemens’s notion that he could utilize this process for the casting of brass dies for stamping book covers—­that, so applied, the fortunes to be made out of it would be larger and more numerous.  Howells tells how, at one time, Clemens thought the “damned human race” was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air-bubbles in it.  This was the time referred to and the race had to go unredeemed; for, after long, worried, costly experimenting, the brass refused to accommodate its nature to the new idea, while the chalk plate itself, with all its subsidiary and auxiliary possibilities, was infringed upon right and left, and the protecting patent failed to hold.  The process was doomed, in any case.  It was barely established before the photographic etching processes, superior in all ways, were developed and came quickly into use.  The kaolatype enterprise struggled nobly for a considerable period.  Clemens brought his niece’s husband, young Charles L. Webster, from Fredonia to manage it for him, and backed it liberally.  Webster was vigorous, hard-working, and capable; but the end of each month showed a deficit, until Clemens was from forty to fifty thousand dollars out of pocket in his effort to save the race with chalk and brass.  The history of these several ventures (and there were others), dismissed here in a few paragraphs, would alone make a volume not without interest, certainly not without humor.  Following came the type-setting machine, but we are not ready for that.  Of necessity it is a longer, costlier story.