It was hoped that the profits from the Yankee would provide for all needs until the great sums which were to come from the type-setter should come rolling in.  The book did yield a large return, but, alas! the hope of the type-setter, deferred year after year and month after month, never reached fulfilment.  Its inventor, James W. Paige, whom Mark Twain once called “a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel,” during ten years of persistent experiment had created one of the most marvelous machines ever constructed.  It would set and distribute type, adjust the spaces, detect flaws—­would perform, in fact, anything that a human being could do, with more exactness and far more swiftness.  Mark Twain, himself a practical printer, seeing it in its earlier stages of development, and realizing what a fortune must come from a perfect type-setting machine, was willing to furnish his last dollar to complete the invention.  But there the trouble lay.  It could never be complete.  It was too intricate, too much like a human being, too easy to get out of order, too hard to set right.  Paige, fully confident, always believed he was just on the verge of perfecting some appliance that would overcome all difficulties, and the machine finally consisted of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which required expert workmanship and had to be fitted by hand.  Mark Twain once wrote: 

   “All other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly
   into commonplaces contrasted with this awful, mechanical miracle.”

This was true, and it conveys the secret of its failure.  It was too much of a miracle to be reliable.  Sometimes it would run steadily for hours, but then some part of its delicate mechanism would fail, and days, even weeks, were required to repair it.  It is all too long a story to be given here.  It has been fully told elsewhere.[10] By the end of 1890 Mark Twain had put in all his available capital, and was heavily in debt.  He had spent one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the machine, no penny of which would ever be returned.  Outside capital to carry on the enterprise was promised, but it failed him.  Still believing that there were “millions in it,” he realized that for the present, at least, he could do no more.

Two things were clear:  he must fall back on authorship for revenue, and he must retrench.  In the present low stage of his fortunes he could no longer afford to live in the Hartford house.  He decided to take the family abroad, where living was cheaper, and where he might be able to work with fewer distractions.

He began writing at a great rate articles and stories for the magazines.  He hunted out the old play he had written with Howells long before, and made a book of it, “The American Claimant.”  Then, in June, 1891, they closed the beautiful Hartford house, where for seventeen years they had found an ideal home; where the children had grown through their sweet, early life; where the world’s wisest had come and gone, pausing a little to laugh with the world’s greatest merrymaker.  The furniture was shrouded, the curtains drawn, the light shut away.