3,000 ems an hour, which, counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen’s work.  William Hamersley was there.  He said he was already a considerable owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could afford.  Wherefore, I set down my name for an additional $3,000.  It is here that the music begins.

It was the so-called Farnham machine that he saw, invented by James W. Paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting for the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been a different one.  But Paige was never content short of absolute perfection —­a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely so.  Clemens’ used to say later that the Paige type-setter would do everything that a human being could do except drink and swear and go on a strike.  He might properly have omitted the last item, but of that later.  Paige was a small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with a crystal-clear mind, but a dreamer and a visionary.  Clemens says of him:  “He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel.”

It is easy to see now that Mark Twain and Paige did not make a good business combination.  When Paige declared that, wonderful as the machine was, he could do vastly greater things with it, make it worth many more and much larger fortunes by adding this attachment and that, Clemens was just the man to enter into his dreams and to furnish the money to realize them.  Paige did not require much money at first, and on the capital already invested he tinkered along with his improvements for something like four or five years; Hamersley and Clemens meantime capitalizing the company and getting ready to place the perfected invention on the market.  By the time the Grant episode had ended Clemens had no reason to believe but that incalculable wealth lay just ahead, when the newspapers should be apprised of the fact that their types were no longer to be set by hand.  Several contracts had been made with Paige, and several new attachments had been added to the machine.  It seemed to require only one thing more, the justifier, which would save the labor of the extra man.  Paige could be satisfied with nothing short of that, even though the extra man’s wage was unimportant.  He must have his machine do it all, and meantime five precious years had slipped away.  Clemens, in his memoranda, says: 

    End of 1885.  Paige arrives at my house unheralded.  I had seen
    little or nothing of him for a year or two.  He said: 

    “What will you complete the machine for?”

    “What will it cost?”

    “Twenty thousand dollars; certainly not over $30,000.”

    “What will you give?”

    “I’ll give you half.”

Clemens was “flush” at this time.  His reading tour with Cable, the great sale of Huck Finn, the prospect of the Grant book, were rosy realities.  He said: