The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1901-04-11

machine started. The steam softens the
paper, the knives cut it up fine. Present.
ly it is only gray pulp.
This pulp sells for 81 a hundredweght,
and is turned into images of George
Washington, the Washington monument,
ETC., for sale by dealers in souvenirs.
Each of these crude images is labeled as
representing $500 of paper currency" or
some other large sum- which is wholly
matter of guess work.
Worn and Mutilated.
One result Of the governments failure
TO encourage the redemption Of currency
is that currency comes to the treasury
in extraordinary condition and a corps
of experts is required to identify it. Cur
rency is handled until it is falling to
pieces Sometimes it is buried and it rots
until it is hardly recognizable Frequent
ly it meets with an accident and as burn
ing. or mastication by cows, or nibbling
| by mice. Money comes to the treasury
in the form of pulp, taken from the stom-
achs of cows or dogs; it is offered in
birds nests or rats nests; it appears
as ashes. The principal expert engaged
in the Identification of this mutilated
money is Mrs. Brown. All the other ex-
perts are women, and they work with
surprising results sorting out the bits Of
paper ard Identifying them. ,
The identification of this mutilated
money is not very nice job Some
times it is not very clean job. The
number of stories told in connection with
these mutilated notes is countless. One
of the most frequent is the story of the
mice who had made a nest of currency
put away for safe keeping. A frequent
story is that of money put in a stove
during summer and forgotten when the
fire was lighted in the beginning of win
ter. Railroad accidents are the cause
of much of the expert labor in the re-
demption division. The worst of these on
record was collision in which $4,000
were burned and only 81 of this could be
identified from the ashes. One of the APP
plicants for relief under the stove divis-
ion was a New York laundryman named
Quong Sing. He had $426 in his stove pipe,
but, fortunately, the fire which his as
sistant built did not damage any of this
money beyond redemption. There are
about hundred of these stove cases
every year.
Attempts at Sw}ndIinE.
The redemption division is subject to
frequent attacks by swindlers, but Mr..
Relyea, the chief, knows most of the
! tricks they practice. The most remarka-
| BILE attempt to swindle within his exper-
| fence was that of a man who sent in three
apparently half-burned notes from a place
| in Kansas. He made affidavit telling with
great circumstance how he had hung his
| waistcoat on a fence while burning brush
in field, how the fence caught fire and
the money was partly consumed. He was
a director of the bank through which he
sent these notes to the treasury for re-
| demption. When the treasury refused to
pay them and accused him of fraud he
! was very indignant and threatened suit
The matter was put in the hands of the
district attorney, and the man in time
pleaded guilty to fraud. 1t happened that
in the files of the treasury were the 9th
| er halves of the three bills which the
Kansas farmer had sent in They had
come in from a New York man with a
! plausible story and had been redeemed
| but as there seemed a slight irregularitv
| about them, they were not sent to the
macerator, but were put in the files of
the treasury. 1t is probable the other
halves Of the notes were sent to the far
ner in the course of a green goods game
| and he could not resist the temptation to
try to work them off on the government
Another That Failed.
Another attempt to swindle was made
by a boy working in a New York Bank
He collected a great many scraps of
money about the bank and sent them in
with the statement that they were the
remains of $500 worth of notes chewed by
rats. The experts quickly determined
that they were the odds and ends Of prob
ably one hundred different notes, and of
course nothing was done in the matter
The boy might have been prosecuted, but
that did not seem worth while.
Another remarkable story told in the
redemption division is that of the finding
of two $500 notes on the lake front of
Chicago. They were in small scraps. The
two colored laborers who found them took
them to the treasury, but were told they
would not be redeemed unless proof of
ownership was furnished, so they made
nothing by their find.