watch company in western New York was ready to sell him a block of
shares by the time he was prepared to experiment again, but it did not
quite live to declare the first dividend on his investment.

Senator John P. Jones invited him to join in the organization of an
accident insurance company, and such was Jones's confidence in the
venture that he guaranteed Clemens against loss. Mark Twain's only
profit from this source was in the delivery of a delicious speech, which
he made at a dinner given to Cornelius Walford, of London, an insurance
author of repute. Jones was paying back the money presently, and about
that time came a young inventor named Graham Bell, offering stock in a
contrivance for carrying the human voice on an electric wire. At almost
any other time Clemens would eagerly have welcomed this opportunity; but
he was so gratified at having got his money out of the insurance venture
that he refused to respond to the happy "hello" call of fortune. In some
memoranda made thirty years later he said:

I declined. I said I didn't want anything more to do with wildcat
speculation. Then he [Bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five. I
said I didn't want it at any price. He became eager; insisted that I
take five hundred dollars' worth. He said he would sell me as much as
I wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my
hands and measure it in a plug hat; said I could have a whole hatful
for five hundred dollars. But I was the burnt child, and I resisted all
these temptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact,
and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a
friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later.

About the end of the year I put up a telephone wire from my house down
to the Courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first
one that was ever used in a private house in the world.

That had been only a little while before he sailed for Europe. When he
returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest
in the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage.

He had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend
Dan Slote got hold of a new process for engraving--the kaolatype or
"chalk-plate" process--which was going to revolutionize the world of
illustration, he promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was
satisfied with nothing short of control. It was an ingenious process: a
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