on the next day that same note with a perfect one for five hundred pounds is shown to us with an intimation of the fact we look at every letter � we trace every line � follow every flourish we hold both up to the light � we our with the waves of the water mark we confess that we cannot pronounce but we have an opinion derived from a slight in the fine stroke of the figure that no is the so indeed it was yet the bank had picked it out from lie hundred genuine notes as � upon it as rapidly as if it had been printed with green ink upon card board bank note this then gentlemen and sporting note is the kind of odds which is against you a minute of the note assured us of your exceeding skill and ingenuity but it also convinced us of the superiority of the ordeal which you have to blind and to pass in this instance you had followed the s plan and had put with great cunning the additional marks to the in to make it into a to hide the out of the top or of the figure � to make the angle from which to draw the fine line of the � you had inserted with a pen the figures ib as if that sum had been received from a person bearing a name that you had written above you had with extraordinary neatness cut out the from and filled up the hole with an abstracted from some note of lesser value you had fitted it with remarkable precision � only you had not got the quite upright enough to pass the shrewd glance of the bank we have seen a one pound note made up of pieces of a hundred other bank notes and on a piece of paper like a note that had been accidentally torn so as to present an entire and whole to alter with a pen a into a is an easy task � to cut out the from the date in one note and it into another needs only a in paper cutting but to change the special by which each note is distinguished is a feat only second in impossibility to every court card of every suit six times running in a rubber of yet we have seen a note so cleverly altered by this expedient that it was actually paid by the bank if the reader will take a bank note out of his purse and examine its number he will at at once appreciate the combination of chances required to find on other note any other figure that shall any one of the bank note so as to avoid detection the number of � very bank note is printed twice on one line � first on the words i promise secondly on the words or bearer sometimes the figures cover the whole of those words � sometimes they only partly obscure them no now lies before us suppose we � to substitute the of another note for the first of the one now under our eye we see that the covers a little bit of the p and in three places the r in promise now to give this alteration the smallest chance we must look through hundreds of other notes till we find an which not only covers a part of the p and the r in three places but in precisely the same places as the on our note does else the strokes of those letters would not meet when the was let in and instant detection would but even then the job would only be half done the second stands upon the or in or bearer and we should have to investigate several hundred more notes to find an that that little word exactly in the same manner and then let it in with such that not the part of a hair s breath of the transferred paper should fail to range with the rest of the letters and figures on the altered note to say nothing of hiding the in the paper this is the triumph of dexterity it is a species of patch work far beyond the most sublime achievements of old patch himself time has proved that the steady perseverance of the bank � despite the most � in gradually improving their original note and thus preserving those most essential qualities simplicity and � has been a better to than any one of the hundreds of plans pictures and colors which have been forced upon the bank note notice whole note is nearly extinct the lives of eminent need only wait for a single for only one man is left who can claim superiority oyer and he was for the bank of england bom a little too late to trip up his heels or those of the late mr charles price he can do everything with a note that the and and can do and a great deal more as a bank note is to a proverb he can split it into three perfect continuous flat and even he has more than one design sent into the bank as an in to you may if you like lend him a hundred pound note he will undertake to discharge every trace of ink from it and return it to you perfectly and a per feet blank we are not quite sure that if you were to bum a bank note and hand him the black that he would not it and join it and it back again into a very piece of but we are sure of the truth of the following story which we have from our friend the referred to and who is no other than the chief of the and department of the bank of england � some years in the days of the thirty notes � a 