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 between the two. They have waited--with no very gaudy
patience--but still they have waited; and I could prove to them to-day
that they have not lost anything by it. But I reserve the proof for the
present--except in the case of the N. Y. Herald; I sent an invitation
there the other day--a courtesy due a paper which ordered $240,000 worth
of our machines long ago when it was still in a crude condition. The
Herald has ordered its foreman to come up here next Thursday; but that
is the only invitation which will go out for some time yet.

The machine was finished several weeks ago, and has been running ever
since in the machine shop. It is a magnificent creature of steel, all of
Pratt & Whitney's super-best workmanship, and as nicely adjusted and as
accurate as a watch. In construction it is as elaborate and complex
as that machine which it ranks next to, by every right--Man--and in
performance it is as simple and sure.

Anybody can set type on it who can read--and can do it after only 15
minutes' instruction. The operator does not need to leave his seat at
the keyboard; for the reason that he is not required to do anything
but strike the keys and set type--merely one function; the spacing,
justifying, emptying into the galley, and distributing of dead matter is
all done by the machine without anybody's help--four funct