Charles Dudley Warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous sake; and so indeed am I, but more because it has drawn the sting of my fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened.

With reverence and affection,
Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.

So Samuel Clemens had reached the half-century mark; reached it in what seemed the fullness of success from every viewpoint.  If he was not yet the foremost American man of letters, he was at least the most widely known he sat upon the highest mountain-top.  Furthermore, it seemed to him that fortune was showering her gifts into his lap.  His unfortunate investments were now only as the necessary experiments that had led him to larger successes.  As a publisher, he was already the most conspicuous in the world, and he contemplated still larger ventures:  a type-setting machine patent, in which he had invested, and now largely controlled, he regarded as the chief invention of the age, absolutely certain to yield incalculable wealth.  His connection with the Grant family had associated him with an enterprise looking to the building of a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf.  Charles A. Dana, of the Sun, had put him in the way of obtaining for publication the life of the Pope, Leo XIII, officially authorized by the Pope himself, and this he regarded as a certain fortune.

Now that the tide had turned he felt no hesitancy in reckoning a fortune from almost any venture.  The Grant book, even on the liberal terms allowed to the author, would yield a net profit of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to its publishers.  Huck Finn would yield fifty thousand dollars more.  The sales of his other books had considerably increased.  Certainly, at fifty, Mark Twain’s fortunes were at flood-tide; buoyant and jubilant, he was floating on the topmost wave.  If there were undercurrents and undertow they were down somewhere out of sight.  If there were breakers ahead, they were too far distant to be heard.  So sure was he of the triumphant consummation of every venture that to a friend at his home one night he said: 

“I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity.  It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.”

CLIX

THE LIFE OF THE POPE

As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now again literature had dropped into the background, had become an avocation, while financial interests prevailed.  There were two chief ventures—­the business of Charles L. Webster & Co. and the promotion of the Paige type-setting machine.  They were closely identified in fortunes, so closely that in time the very existence of each depended upon the success of the other; yet they were quite distinct, and must be so treated in this story.