are small. Both together they amount to only $12,500. I
hope you will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was
saddled onto me 3 years ago. And yet there is such a solid pleasure in
paying the things that I reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that
kind of a hobble after all. Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of
it; & the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping
from the beginning.

By the end of January, 1898, Mark Twain had accumulated enough money to
make the final payment to his creditors and stand clear of debt. At the
time of his failure he said he had given himself five years in which to
clear himself of the heavy obligation. He had achieved that result in
less than three. The world heralded it as a splendid triumph.

Miss Katharine I. Harrison, Henry Rogers's secretary, who had been in
charge of the details, wrote in her letter announcing his freedom:

"I wish I could shout it across the water to you so that you would get
it ten days ahead of this letter."

Miss Harrison's letter shows that something like thirteen thousand
dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped
away.

Clemens had kept his financial progress from the press, but the payment
of the final claims was distinctly a matter of news and the papers made
the most of it. Head-lines shouted it, there were long editorials in
which Mark Twain was heralded as a second Walter Scott, though it was
hardly necessary that he should be compared with anybody; he had been
in that--as in those peculiarities which had invited his disaster--just
himself.

One might suppose now that he had had enough of inventions and
commercial enterprises of every sort that is, one who did not know Mark
Twain might suppose this; but it would not be true. Within a month after
the debts were paid he had negotiated with the great Austrian inventor,
Szczepanik, and his business manager for the American rights of a
wonderful carpet-pattern machine, obtained an option for these rights
at fifteen hundred thousand dollars, and, Sellers-like, was planning to
organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars
to control carpet-weaving industries of the world. He records in his
note-book that a certain Mr. Wood, representing the American carpet
interests, called upon him and, in the course of their conversation,
asked him at what price he would sell his option.

I declined, and got away fr