In one paragraph of Orion’s letter he refers to the machine as a “cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived.”  That was a profound truth, though not as he intended it.  That creation of James Paige’s brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of its creator, and added something on its own account.  It was discovered presently that it had a habit of breaking the types.  Paige said it was a trifling thing:  he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine, and that deadly expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a month for the band of workmen and experts in Pratt & Whitney’s machine shops did not cease.  In February the machine was again setting and justifying type “to a hair,” and Whitmore’s son, Fred, was running it at a rate of six thousand ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto unknown in the history of the world.  His speed was increased to eight thousand ems an hour by the end of the year, and the machine was believed to have a capacity of eleven thousand.  No type-setter invented to this day could match it for accuracy and precision when it was in perfect order, but its point of perfection was apparently a vanishing point.  It would be just reached, when it would suddenly disappear, and Paige would discover other needed corrections.  Once, when it was apparently complete as to every detail; and running like a human thing, with such important customers as the New York Herald and other great papers ready to place their orders, Paige suddenly discovered that it required some kind of an air-blast, and it was all taken down again and the air-blast, which required months to invent and perfect, was added.

But what is the use of remembering all these bitter details?  The steady expense went on through another year, apparently increasing instead of diminishing, until, by the beginning of 1890, Clemens was finding it almost impossible to raise funds to continue the work.  Still he struggled on.  It was the old mining fascination—­“a foot farther into the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold.”

He sent for Joe Goodman to come and help him organize a capital-stock company, in which Senator Jones and John Mackay, old Comstock friends, were to be represented.  He never for a moment lost faith in the final outcome, and he believed that if they could build their own factory the delays and imperfections of construction would be avoided.  Pratt & Whitney had been obliged to make all the parts by hand.  With their own factory the new company would have vast and perfect machinery dedicated entirely to the production of type-setters.

Nothing short of two million dollars capitalization was considered, and Goodman made at least three trips from California to the East and labored with Jones and Mackay all that winter and at intervals during the following year, through which that “cunning devil,” the machine, consumed its monthly four thousand dollars—­money that was the final gleanings and sweepings of every nook and corner of the strong-box and bank-account and savings of the Clemens family resources.  With all of Mark Twain’s fame and honors his life at this period was far from an enviable one.  It was, in fact, a fevered delirium, often a veritable nightmare.