dvanced him funds with which to complete his dramatic
education, and Gillette's first engagement seems to have been with the
Colonel Sellers company. Mark Twain often advanced money in the interest
of education. A young sculptor he sent to Paris for two years' study.
Among others, he paid the way of two colored students through college.

L.

THE MACHINE. GOOD-BY TO HARTFORD. "JOAN" IS BEGUN

It was hoped that the profits from the Yankee would provide for all needs
until the great sums which were to come from the type-setter should come
rolling in. The book did yield a large return, but, alas! the hope of
the type-setter, deferred year after year and month after month, never
reached fulfilment. Its inventor, James W. Paige, whom Mark Twain once
called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations
are written in steel," during ten years of persistent experiment had
created one of the most marvelous machines ever constructed. It would
set and distribute type, adjust the spaces, detect flaws--would perform,
in fact, anything that a human being could do, with more exactness and
far more swiftness. Mark Twain, himself a practical printer, seeing it
in its earlier stages of development, and realizing what a fortune must
come from a perfect type-setting machine, was willing to furnish his last
dollar to complete the invention. But there the trouble lay. It could
never be complete. It was too intricate, too much like a human being,
too easy to get out of order, too hard to set right. Paige, fully
confident, always believed he was just on the verge of perfecting some
appliance that would overcome all difficulties, and the machine finally
consisted of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which required
expert workmanship and had to be fitted by hand. Mark Twain once wrote:

"All other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly
into commonplaces contrasted with this awful, mechanical miracle."

This was true, and it conveys the secret of its failure. It was too much
of a miracle to be reliable. Sometimes it would run steadily for hours,
but then some part of its delicate mechanism would fail, and days, even
weeks, were required to repair it. It is all too long a story to be
given here. It has been fully told elsewhere.[10] By the end of 1890
Mark Twain had put in all his available capital, and was heavily in debt.
He had spent one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the m