g little chances like that, and almost always
losing by it, too. Some time afterward I was invited to go down to
the factory and see the machine. I went, promising myself nothing,
for I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held
the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting
machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot
be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or
retire defeated. So, the performance I witnessed did most
thoroughly amaze me. Here was a machine that was really setting
type, and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too. Moreover, it
was distributing its case at the same time. The distribution was
automatic; the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter and
without human help or suggestion, for it began its work of its own
accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own
accord when they were full enough. The machine was almost a
complete compositor; it lacked but one feature--it did not "justify"
the lines. This was done by the operator's assistant.

I saw the operator set at the rate of 3,000 ems an hour, which,
counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen's work.
William Hamersley was there. He said he was already a considerable
owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could
afford. Wherefore, I set down my name for an additional $3,000. It
is here that the music begins.

It was the so-called Farnham machine that he saw, invented by James W.
Paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting
for the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been
a different one. But Paige was never content short of absolute
perfection--a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely
so. Clemens' used to say later that the Paige type-setter would do
everything that a human being could do except drink and swear and go
on a strike. He might properly have omitted the last item, but of that
later. Paige was a small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with
a crystal-clear mind, but a dreamer and a visionary. Clemens says
of him: "He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime
creations are written in steel."

It is easy to see now that Mark Twain and Paige did not make a good
business combination. When Paige declared that, wonderful as the m