Oct. 18, ’93.  Dear, dear sweetheart,—­I don’t seem to get even half a chance to write you, these last two days, and yet there’s lots to say.

Apparently everything is at last settled as to the giveaway of L. A. L., and the papers will be signed and the transfer made to-morrow morning.

Meantime I have got the best and wisest man in the whole Standard Oil group of mufti-millionaires a good deal interested in looking into the type-setter (this is private, don’t mention it.) He has been searching into that thing for three weeks, and yesterday he said to me, “I find the machine to be all you represented it—­I have here exhaustive reports from my own experts, and I know every detail of its capacity, its immense value, its construction, cost, history, and all about its inventor’s character.  I know that the New York Co. and the Chicago Co. are both stupid, and that they are unbusinesslike people, destitute of money and in a hopeless boggle.”

Then he told me the scheme he had planned, then said:  “If I can arrange with these people on this basis—­it will take several weeks to find out —­I will see to it that they get the money they need.  Then the thing will move right along and your royalties will cease to be waste paper.  I will post you the minute my scheme fails or succeeds.  In the meantime, you stop walking the floor.  Go off to the country and try to be gay.  You may have to go to walking again, but don’t begin till I tell you my scheme has failed.”  And he added:  “Keep me posted always as to where you are—­for if I need you and can use you—­I want to know where to put my hand on you.”

If I should even divulge the fact that the Standard Oil is merely talking remotely about going into the type-setter, it would send my royalties up.

With worlds and worlds of love and kisses to you all,
          
                                             Saml.

With so great a burden of care shifted to the broad financial shoulders of H. H. Rogers, Mark Twain’s spirits went ballooning, soaring toward the stars.  He awoke, too, to some of the social gaieties about him, and found pleasure in the things that in the hour of his gloom had seemed mainly mockery.  We find him going to a Sunday evening at Howells’s, to John Mackay’s, and elsewhere.

To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris: 

Dec. 2, ’93.  Livy darling,—­Last night at John Mackay’s the dinner consisted of soup, raw oysters, corned beef and cabbage, and something like a custard.  I ate without fear or stint, and yet have escaped all suggestion of indigestion.  The men present were old gray Pacific-coasters whom I knew when I and they were young and not gray.  The talk was of the days when we went gypsying a long time ago—­thirty years.  Indeed it was a talk of the dead.  Mainly that.  And of how they looked, and the harum-scarum things they did and said.  For there were no cares in