The type-setting machine began to loom large in the background.  Clemens believed it perfected by this time.  Paige had got it together again and it was running steadily—­or approximately so —­setting type at a marvelous speed and with perfect accuracy.  In time an expert operator would be able to set as high as eight thousand ems per hour, or about ten times as much as a good compositor could set and distribute by hand.  Those who saw it were convinced—­most of them—­that the type-setting problem was solved by this great mechanical miracle.  If there were any who doubted, it was because of its marvelously minute accuracy which the others only admired.  Such accuracy, it was sometimes whispered, required absolutely perfect adjustment, and what would happen when the great inventor—­“the poet in steel,” as Clemens once called him—­was no longer at hand to supervise and to correct the slightest variation.  But no such breath of doubt came to Mark Twain; he believed the machine as reliable as a constellation.

But now there was need of capital to manufacture and market the wonder.  Clemens, casting about in his mind, remembered Senator Jones, of Nevada, a man of great wealth, and his old friend, Joe Goodman, of Nevada, in whom Jones had unlimited confidence.  He wrote to Goodman, and in this letter we get a pretty full exposition of the whole matter as it stood in the fall of 1889.  We note in this communication that Clemens says that he has been at the machine three years and seven months, but this was only the period during which he had spent the regular monthly sum of three thousand dollars.  His interest in the invention had begun as far back as 1880.

To Joseph T. Goodman, in Nevada: 

Private.  Hartford, Oct. 7, ’89.  Dear Joe,-I had a letter from Aleck Badlam day before yesterday, and in answering him I mentioned a matter which I asked him to consider a secret except to you and John McComb,—­[This is Col.  McComb, of the Alta-California, who had sent Mark Twain on the Quaker City excursion]—­as I am not ready yet to get into the newspapers.

I have come near writing you about this matter several times, but it wasn’t ripe, and I waited.  It is ripe, now.  It is a type-setting machine which I undertook to build for the inventor (for a consideration).  I have been at it three years and seven months without losing a day, at a cost of $3,000 a month, and in so private a way that Hartford has known nothing about it.  Indeed only a dozen men have known of the matter.  I have reported progress from time to time to the proprietors of the N. Y. Sun, Herald, Times, World, Harper Brothers and John F. Trow; also to the proprietors of the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe.  Three years ago I asked all these people to squelch their frantic desire to load up their offices with the Mergenthaler (N.  Y. Tribune) machine, and wait for mine and then choose