oor time to float any
costly enterprise. The Chicago company who was trying to build the
machines made little progress. The book business everywhere was
bad. In a brief note following the foregoing letters Clemens wrote
Hall:

"It is now past the middle of July and no cablegram to say the
machine is finished. We are afraid you are having miserable days
and worried nights, and we sincerely wish we could relieve you, but
it is all black with us and we don't know any helpful thing to say
or do."

He inclosed some kind of manuscript proposition for John Brisben
Walker, of the Cosmopolitan, with the comment: "It is my ingenious
scheme to protect the family against the alms-house for one more
year--and after that--well, goodness knows! I have never felt so
desperate in my life--and good reason, for I haven't got a penny to
my name, and Mrs. Clemens hasn't enough laid up with Langdon to keep
us two months."

It was like Mark Twain, in the midst of all this turmoil, to project
an entirely new enterprise; his busy mind was always visioning
success in unusual undertakings, regardless of immediate conditions
and the steps necessary to achievement.

*****

To Fred J. Hall, in New York:

July 26, '93.

DEAR MR. HALL,--..... I hope the machine will be finished this month;
but it took me four years and cost me $100,000 to finish the other
machine after it was apparently entirely complete and setting type like
a house-afire.

I wonder what they call "finished." After it is absolutely perfect it
can't go into a printing-office until it has had a month's wear, running
night and day, to get the bearings smooth, I judge.

I may be able to run over about mid-October. Then if I find you relieved
of L. A. L. we will start a magazine inexpensive, and of an entirely
unique sort. Arthur Stedman and his father editors of it. Arthur could
do all the work, merely submitting it to his father for approval.

The first number should pay--and all subsequent ones--25 cents a number.
Cost of first number (20,000 copies) $2,000. Give most of them away,
sell the rest. Advertising and other expenses--cost unknown. Send one to
all newspapers--it would get a notice--favorable, too.

But we cannot undertake it until L. A. L, is out of the way. With our
hands free and some capital to spare