gan to calculate the number of millions he would be
worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the
waiting world. He covered pages with figures that never ran short of
millions, and frequently approached the billion mark. Colonel Sellers in
his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly. He obtained a list of
all the newspapers in the United States and in Europe, and he counted up
the machines that would be required by each. To his nephew, Sam Moffett,
visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count
the profits from the typesetter. He realized clearly enough that a
machine which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a
dozen men or more would revolutionize type composition. The fact that
other inventors besides Paige were working quite as diligently and
perhaps toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him. Rumors
came of the Rogers machine and the Thorne machine and the Mergenthaler
linotype, but Mark Twain only smiled. When the promoters of the
Mergenthaler offered to exchange half their interests for a half
interest in the Paige patent, to obtain thereby a wider insurance of
success, it only confirmed his trust, and he let the golden opportunity
go by.

Clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year. Then
Paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that
four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand
dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in New York. He had
discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at Pratt & Whitney's
shops was building a new one from the ground up--a machine of twenty
thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand
workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive.
It was an undertaking for a millionaire.

Paige offered to borrow from Clemens the amount needed, offering the
machine as security. Clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and
continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three
to four thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty
thousand dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished. This would
be early in 1888, by which time other machines had reached a state of
completion and were being placed on the market. The Mergenthaler, in
particular, was attracting wide attention. Paige laughed at it, and
Clemens, too, regarded it as a joke. The moment their ma