He was interested in everything:  in music, as little as he knew of it.  He had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception of sound.  Reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching to melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who could supply a tuneful setting.  Once he wrote to his friend the Rev. Dr. Parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for Tennyson’s “Bugle Song,” outlining an attractive scheme for it which the order of his fancy had formulated.  Dr. Parker replied that the “Bugle Song,” often attempted, had been the despair of many musicians.

He was interested in business affairs.  Already, before the European trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary ventures.  He had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income.  The old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those restless mining days, always possessed him.  There were no silver mines in the East, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort; but there were plenty of equivalents—­inventions, stock companies, and the like.  He had begun by putting five thousand dollars into the American Publishing Company; but that was a sound and profitable venture, and deserves to be remembered for that reason.

Then a man came along with a patent steam generator which would save ninety per cent. of the fuel energy, or some such amount, and Mark Twain was early persuaded that it would revolutionize the steam manufactures of the world; so he put in whatever bank surplus he had and bade it a permanent good-by.

Following the steam generator came a steam pulley, a rather small contrivance, but it succeeded in extracting thirty-two thousand dollars from his bank account in a period of sixteen months.

By the time he had accumulated a fresh balance, a new method of marine telegraphy was shown him, so he used it up on that, twenty-five thousand dollars being the price of this adventure.

A watch company in western New York was ready to sell him a block of shares by the time he was prepared to experiment again, but it did not quite live to declare the first dividend on his investment.

Senator John P. Jones invited him to join in the organization of an accident insurance company, and such was Jones’s confidence in the venture that he guaranteed Clemens against loss.  Mark Twain’s only profit from this source was in the delivery of a delicious speech, which he made at a dinner given to Cornelius Walford, of London, an insurance author of repute.  Jones was paying back the money presently, and about that time came a young inventor named Graham Bell, offering stock in a contrivance for carrying the human voice on an electric wire.  At almost any other time Clemens would eagerly have welcomed this opportunity; but he was so gratified at having got his money out of the insurance venture that he refused to respond to the happy “hello” call of fortune.  In some memoranda made thirty years later he said: