I am terribly tired of business.  I am by nature and disposition unfit for it, & I want to get out of it.  I am standing on the Mount Morris volcano with help from the machine a long, long way off—­& doubtless a long way further off than the Connecticut company imagine.

    Get me out of business!

He knew something of the delays of completing a typesetting machine, and he had little faith in any near relief from that source.  He wrote again go Hall, urging him to sell some of his type-setter royalties.  They should be worth something now since the manufacturing company was actually in operation; but with the terrible state of the money-market there was no sale for anything.  Clemens attempted to work, but put in most of his time footing up on the margin of his manuscript the amount of his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and the possibilities of his income.  It was weary, hard, nerve-racking employment.  About the muddle of June they closed Viviani.  Susy Clemens went to Paris to cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to preparing for the operatic stage.  Clemens took Mrs. Clemens, with little Jean, to Germany for the baths.  Clara, who had graduated from Mrs. Willard’s school in Berlin, joined them in Munich, and somewhat later Susy also joined them, for Madame Marchesi, the great master of voice-culture, had told her that she must acquire physique to carry that voice of hers before she would undertake to teach her.

In spite of his disturbed state of mind Clemens must have completed some literary work during this period, for we find first mention, in a letter to Hall, of his immortal defense of Harriet Shelley, a piece of writing all the more marvelous when we consider the conditions of its performance.  Characteristically, in the same letter, he suddenly develops a plan for a new enterprise—­this time for a magazine which Arthur Stedman or his father will edit, and the Webster company will publish as soon as their present burdens are unloaded.  But we hear no more of this project.

But by August he was half beside himself with anxiety.  On the 6th he wrote Hall: 

Here we never see a newspaper, but even if we did I could not come anywhere near appreciating or correctly estimating the tempest you have been buffeting your way through—­only the man who is in it can do that—­but I have tried not to burden you thoughtlessly or wantonly.  I have been overwrought & unsettled in mind by apprehensions, & that is a thing that is not helpable when one is in a strange land & sees his resources melt down to a two months’ supply & can’t see any sure daylight beyond.  The bloody machine offers but a doubtful outlook—­& will still offer nothing much better for a long time to come; for when the “three weeks” are up, there will be three months’ tinkering to follow, I guess.  That is unquestionably the boss machine of the world, but is the toughest one on prophets when it is in an incomplete state that has ever seen the light.

And three days later: