re unable to see a profit in investing so
large a capital in a plant for constructing the machines.

Clemens prepared estimates showing that the American business alone
would earn thirty-five million dollars a year, and the European business
twenty million dollars more. These dazzled, but they did not convince
the capitalists. Jones was sincerely anxious to see the machine succeed,
and made an engagement to come out to see it work, but a day or
two before he was to come Paige was seized with an inspiration. The
type-setter was all in parts when the day came, and Jones's visit had to
be postponed. Goodman wrote that the fatal delay had "sicklied over the
bloom" of Jones's original enthusiasm.

Yet Clemens seems never to have been openly violent with Paige. In the
memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote:

Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he
knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut
out all human succor and watch that trap until he died.

He was grabbing at straws now. He offered a twentieth or a hundredth or
a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one
thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. He tried to capitalize his
advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but
when the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final
outcome, and though at his wit's ends for further funds, he returned the
checks to the friends who had sent them. One five-thousand-dollar check
from a friend named Arnot, in Elmira, went back by the next mail. He
was willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money
from those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their
own. He still had faith in Jones, faith which lasted up to the 13th of
February, 1891. Then came a final letter, in which Jones said that he
had canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as Mackay, Don
Cameron, Whitney, and others, with the result that they would have
nothing to do with the machine. Whitney and Cameron, he said, were large
stockholders in the Mergenthaler. Jones put it more kindly and more
politely than that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as
to the machine's future an ambiguous statement. A letter from young
Hall came about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the
business. The Library of American Literature, its leading feature, was
handled on the i