The most considerable frauds now perpetrated are not forgeries; but are done upon the plan of the highwayman mentioned in our first chapter. In order to give currency to stolen or lost notes which have been stopped at the Bank (lists of which are supplied to every banker in the country), the numbers and dates are fraudulently altered. Some years since, a gentleman, who had been receiving a large sum of money at the Bank, was robbed of it in an omnibus. The notes gradually came in, but all were altered. The last was one for five hundred pounds, dated the 12th March, 1846, and numbered 32109. On the Monday (3rd June) after the last “Derby Day,” amid the _twenty-five thousand pieces_ of paper that were examined by the Bank Inspectors, there was one note for five hundred pounds, dated 12th March, 1848, and numbered 32409. At that note an inspector suddenly arrested his rapid examination of the pile of which it was one. He scrutinised it for a minute, and pronounced it “altered.” 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 undulate our visuals with the waves of the water-mark. We confess that we cannot pronounce decisively; but we have an opinion derived from a slight “goutiness” in the fine stroke of the figure 4 that No. 32409 is the forgery! so indeed it was. Yet the Bank Inspector had picked it out from the hundred genuine notes as instantaneously--pounced upon it as rapidly, as if it had been printed with green ink upon card-board. This then, O gentlemen forgers and sporting note alterers, is the kind of odds which is against you. A minute investigation of the note assured us of your exceeding skill and ingenuity; but it also convinced us of the superiority of the detective ordeal which you have to blind and to pass. In this instance you had followed the highwayman’s plan, and had put with great cunning, the additional marks to the 1 in 32109 to make it into a 4. To hide the scraping out of the top or serif of the figure 1--to make the angle from which to draw the fine line of the 4--you had artfully inserted with a pen the figures “£16 16” 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 “6” from 1846, and filled up the hole with an 8 abstracted from some note of lesser value. You had fitted it with remarkable precision; only you had not got the 8 quite upright enough to pass the shrewd glance of the Bank Inspector. We have seen a one-pound note made up of refuse pieces of a hundred other Bank notes, and pasted on a piece of paper (like a note that had been accidentally torn), so as to present an entire and _passable_ whole.