By the end of January, 1898, Mark Twain had accumulated enough money to make the final payment to his creditors and stand clear of debt.  At the time of his failure he said he had given himself five years in which to clear himself of the heavy obligation.  He had achieved that result in less than three.  The world heralded it as a splendid triumph.

Miss Katharine I. Harrison, Henry Rogers’s secretary, who had been in charge of the details, wrote in her letter announcing his freedom: 

“I wish I could shout it across the water to you so that you would get it ten days ahead of this letter.”

Miss Harrison’s letter shows that something like thirteen thousand dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped away.

Clemens had kept his financial progress from the press, but the payment of the final claims was distinctly a matter of news and the papers made the most of it.  Head-lines shouted it, there were long editorials in which Mark Twain was heralded as a second Walter Scott, though it was hardly necessary that he should be compared with anybody; he had been in that—­as in those peculiarities which had invited his disaster—­just himself.

One might suppose now that he had had enough of inventions and commercial enterprises of every sort that is, one who did not know Mark Twain might suppose this; but it would not be true.  Within a month after the debts were paid he had negotiated with the great Austrian inventor, Szczepanik, and his business manager for the American rights of a wonderful carpet-pattern machine, obtained an option for these rights at fifteen hundred thousand dollars, and, Sellers-like, was planning to organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars to control carpet-weaving industries of the world.  He records in his note-book that a certain Mr. Wood, representing the American carpet interests, called upon him and, in the course of their conversation, asked him at what price he would sell his option.

I declined, and got away from the subject.  I was afraid he would offer me $500,000 for it.  I should have been obliged to take it, but I was born with a speculative instinct & I did not want that temptation put in my way.

He wrote to Mr. Rogers about the great scheme, inviting the Standard Oil to furnish the capital for it—­but it appears not to have borne the test of Mr. Rogers’s scrutiny, and is heard of no more.

Szczepanik had invented the ‘Fernseher’, or Telelectroscope, the machine by which one sees at a distance.  Clemens would have invested heavily in this, too, for he had implicit faith in its future, but the ‘Fernseher’ was already controlled for the Paris Exposition; so he could only employ Szczepanik as literary material, which he did in two instances:  “The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again” and “From the London Times of 1904”—­magazine articles published in the Century later in the year.  He was fond of Szczepanik and Szczepanik’s backer, Mr. Kleinburg.  In one of his note-book entries he says: