ing. Then we should have had
the good luck to step promptly ashore.

So it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever.
Clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family.
It was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a
live one. A combination known as the Regius Company took over Paige's
interest, but accomplished nothing. Eventually--irony of fate--the
Mergenthaler Company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand
dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous
work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the Sibley College
of Engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery,
for its size, ever constructed. Mark Twain once received a letter from
an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and
patentees, asking for his indorsement. He replied:

DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and
patentees. If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me
nine editions. Send them by express.

Very truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.

The collapse of the "great hope" meant to the Clemens household that
their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to
become more rigid. In a letter on her wedding anniversary, February a
(1895), Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister:

As I was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning Mr.
Clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to
me, saying: "It is our silver-wedding day, and so I give you a present."

It was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that
twenty-five years had brought.

Literary matters, however, prospered. The new book progressed amazingly.
The worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead. He
was deep in the third part-the story of Joan's trial and condemnation,
and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a
reality.

As at Viviani, Clemens read his chapters to the family circle. The
story was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail
martyr; the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts. Susy would
say, "Wait, wait till I get a handkerchief," and one night when the last
pages had been written and read, and Joan had made the supreme expiation
for devotion to a paltry king, Susy wrote in her diary, "To-night Joan
of Arc was