It seems to me that things couldn’t well be going better at Chicago than they are.  There’s no other machine that can set type eight hours with only seventeen minutes’ stoppage through cussedness.  The others do rather more stopping than working.  By and by our machines will be perfect; then they won’t stop at all.

But that was about the end of the good news.  The stoppages became worse and worse.  The type began to break—­the machine had its old trouble:  it was too delicately adjusted—­too complicated.

“Great guns, what is the matter with it?” wrote Clemens in November when he received a detailed account of its misconduct.

Mr. Rogers and his son-in-law, Mr. Broughton, went out to Chicago to investigate.  They went to the Times-Herald office to watch the type-setter in action.  Mr. Rogers once told of this visit to the writer of these chapters.  He said: 

“Certainly it was a marvelous invention.  It was the nearest approach to a human being in the wonderful things it could do of any machine I have ever known.  But that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human being and not enough of a machine.  It had all the complications of the human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it could not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human being.  It was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set up.  I took out my watch and timed its work and counted its mistakes.  We watched it a long time, for it was most interesting, most fascinating, but it was not practical—­that to me was clear.”

It had failed to stand the test.  The Times-Herald would have no more of it.  Mr. Rogers himself could see the uselessness of the endeavor.  He instructed Mr. Broughton to close up the matter as best he could and himself undertook the harder task of breaking the news to Mark Twain.  His letters seem not to have been preserved, but the replies to them tell the story.

169 rue de l’Universite,

    Paris, December 22, 1894.

Dear Mr. Rogers,—­I seemed to be entirely expecting your letter, and also prepared and resigned; but Lord, it shows how little we know ourselves and how easily we can deceive ourselves.  It hit me like a thunder-clap.  It knocked every rag of sense out of my head, and I went flying here and there and yonder, not knowing what I was doing, and only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and substantial out of the crazy storm-drift—­that my dream of ten years was in desperate peril and out of the 60,000 or 70,000 projects for its rescue that came flocking through my skull not one would hold still long enough for me to examine it and size it up.  Have you ever been like that?  Not so much, I reckon.

There was another clearly defined idea—­I must be there and see it die.  That is, if it must die; and maybe if I were there we might hatch