A week later he added what was about his final word on the subject: 

Yours of December 21 has arrived, containing the circular to
stockholders, and I guess the Co. will really quit—­there doesn’t
seem to be any other wise course.

There’s one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize
that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is that it
reverses my horoscope.  The proverb says, “Born lucky, always
lucky.” 
It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned
in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a
drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was
considered to be a cat in disguise.  When the Pennsylvania blew up
and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with 60
others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother “it
means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year
and a half—­he was born lucky.”  Yes, I was somewhere else.  I am so
superstitious that I have always been afraid to have business
dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they
were unlucky people.  All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances
of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my
own stupidity and carelessness.  And so I have felt entirely certain
that the machine would turn up trumps eventually.  It disappointed
me lots of times, but I couldn’t shake off the confidence of a
lifetime in my luck.

    Well, whatever I get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck
    —­the good luck of getting you into the scheme—­for, but for that
    there wouldn’t be any wreckage; it would be total loss.

    I wish you had been in at the beginning.  Then we should have had
    the good luck to step promptly ashore.

So it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever.  Clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family.  It was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a live one.  A combination known as the Regius Company took over Paige’s interest, but accomplished nothing.  Eventually—­irony of fate—­the Mergenthaler Company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the Sibley College of Engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery, for its size, ever constructed.  Mark Twain once received a letter from an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and patentees, asking for his indorsement.  He replied: 

Dear sir,—­I have, as you say, been interested in patents and
patentees.  If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me
nine editions.  Send them by express.

Very truly yours,
S. L. Clemens.