to save time and "language"--the kind of language
that soothes vexation.

I have dictated to a typewriter before--but not
autobiography. Between that experience and the
present one there lies a mighty gap--more than
thirty years! It is a sort of lifetime. In that wide
interval much has happened--to the type-machine
as well as to the rest of us. At the beginning of
that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The
person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But
now it is the other way about: the person who
doesn't own one is a curiosity. I saw a type-machine
for the first time in--what year? I suppose it was
1873--because Nasby was with me at the time, and
it was in Boston. We must have been lecturing, or
we could not have been in Boston, I take it. I
quitted the platform that season.

But never mind about that, it is no matter.
Nasby and I saw the machine through a window,
and went in to look at it. The salesman explained
it to us, showed us samples of its work, and said it
could do fifty-seven words a minute--a statement
which we frankly confessed that we did not believe.
So he put his type-girl to work, and we timed her by
the watch. She actually did the fifty-seven in sixty
seconds. We were partly convinced, but said it
probably couldn't happen again. But it did. We
timed the girl over and over again--with the same
result always: she won out. She did her work on
narrow slips of paper, and we pocketed them as fast
as she turned them out, to show as curiosities. The
price of the machine was one hundred and twenty-

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