Nowadays, if you lose your savings-bank book all you have to do is to notify the bank to stop payment on it. In many other ways, too, depositors are now safeguarded from loss. Forty years ago, however, when savings banks were newer and more autocratic, it was different. The bank book was then something tremendously important, or at least depositors thought so. When the savings bank at the village, six miles from the old home farm in Maine, first opened for business, Mr. Burns, the treasurer, gave each new depositor a sharp lecture. He was a large man with a heavy black beard; as he handed the new bank book to the depositor, he would say in a dictatorial tone: "Now here is your _bank book_." What emphasis he put on those words! "It shows you what you have at the bank. Don't fold it. Don't crumple it. Don't get it dirty. But above all things don't lose it, or let it be stolen from you. If you do, you may lose your entire deposit. We cannot remember you all. Whoever brings your book here may draw out your money. So put this book in a safe place, and keep a sharp eye on it. Remember every word I have told you, or we will not be responsible." The old Squire encouraged us to have a nest egg at the bank, and by the end of the year there were seven bank books at the farm, all carefully put away under lock and key, in fact there were nine, counting the two that belonged to our hired men, Asa and Jim Doane. Acting on the old Squire's exhortation to practise thrift, they vowed that they would lay up a hundred dollars a year from their wages. The Doanes had worked for us for three or four years. Asa was a sturdy fellow of good habits; but Jim, his younger brother, had a besetting sin. About once a month, sometimes oftener, he wanted a playday; we always knew that he would come home from it drunk, and that we should have to put him away in some sequestered place and give him a day in which to recover. For two or three days afterwards Jim would be the meekest, saddest, most shamefaced of human beings. At table he would scarcely look up; and there is not the least doubt that his grief and shame were genuine. Yet as surely as the months passed the same feverish restlessness would again show itself in him. We came to recognize Jim's symptoms only too well, and knew, when we saw them, that he would soon have to have another playday. In fact, if the old Squire refused to let him off on such occasions, Jim would get more and more restless and two or three nights afterwards would steal away surreptitiously. "Jim's a fool!" his brother, Asa, often said impatiently. "He isn't fit to be round here." But the Squire steadily refused to turn Jim off. Many a time the old gentleman sat up half the night with the returned and noisy prodigal. A word from the Squire would calm Jim for the time and would occasionally call forth a burst of repentant tears. Jim's case, indeed, was one of the causes that led us at the old farm so bitterly to hate intoxicants.