Have you noticed the rumor that the Portuguese throne is unsteady, and that the Portuguese slaves are getting restive?  Also, that the head slave-driver of Europe, Alexander III, has so reduced his usual monthly order for chains that the Russian foundries are running on only half time now?  Also that other rumor that English nobility acquired an added stench the other day—­and had to ship it to India and the continent because there wasn’t any more room for it at home?  Things are working.  By and by there is going to be an emigration, may be.  Of course we shall make no preparation; we never do.  In a few years from now we shall have nothing but played-out kings and dukes on the police, and driving the horse-cars, and whitewashing fences, and in fact overcrowding all the avenues of unskilled labor; and then we shall wish, when it is too late, that we had taken common and reasonable precautions and drowned them at Castle Garden.

There followed at this time a number of letters to Goodman, but as there is much of a sameness in them, we need not print them all.  Clemens, in fact, kept the mails warm with letters bulging with schemes for capitalization, and promising vast wealth to all concerned.  When the letters did not go fast enough he sent telegrams.  In one of the letters Goodman is promised “five hundred thousand dollars out of the profits before we get anything ourselves.”  One thing we gather from these letters is that Paige has taken the machine apart again, never satisfied with its perfection, or perhaps getting a hint that certain of its perfections were not permanent.  A letter at the end of November seems worth preserving here.

To Joseph T. Goodman, in California: 

Hartford, Nov. 29, ’89.  Dear Joe, Things are getting into better and more flexible shape every day.  Papers are now being drawn which will greatly simplify the raising of capital; I shall be in supreme command; it will not be necessary for the capitalist to arrive at terms with anybody but me.  I don’t want to dicker with anybody but Jones.  I know him; that is to say, I want to dicker with you, and through you with Jones.  Try to see if you can’t be here by the 15th of January.

The machine was as perfect as a watch when we took her apart the other day; but when she goes together again the 15th of January we expect her to be perfecter than a watch.

Joe, I want you to sell some royalties to the boys out there, if you can, for I want to be financially strong when we go to New York.  You know the machine, and you appreciate its future enormous career better than any man I know.  At the lowest conceivable estimate (2,000 machines a year,) we shall sell 34,000 in the life of the patent—­17 years.

All the family send love to you—­and they mean it, or they wouldn’t say
it. 
                              Yours ever
          
                              mark.