Time has proved that the steady perseverance of the Bank--despite the most furious clamour--in gradually improving their original note and thus preserving those most essential qualities, simplicity and uniformity--has been a better preventive to forgery than any one of the hundreds of plans, pictures, complications, chemicals, and colours, which have been forced upon the Directors’ notice. Whole-note forgery is nearly extinct. The lives of Eminent Forgers need only wait for a single addendum; for only one man is left who can claim superiority over Mathieson, and he was, unfortunately for the Bank of England, born 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 patchers, and alterers, and simulators, can do, and a great deal more. Flimsy as a Bank note is to a proverb, he can split it into three perfect continuous, flat, and even leaves. He has forged more than one design sent into the Bank as an infallible preventive to forgery. 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 uninjured and a perfect blank. We are not quite sure that if you were to burn a Bank note and hand him the black cinders, that he would not bleach it, and join it, and conjure it back again into a very good-looking, payable piece of currency. But we _are_ sure of the truth of the following story, which we have from our friend the transcendant forger referred to; and who is no other than the chief of the Engraving and Engineering department of the Bank of England: Some years ago--in the days of the thirty-shilling notes--a certain Irishman saved up the sum of eighty-seven pounds ten, in notes of the Bank of Ireland. As a sure means of securing this valuable property, he put it in the foot of an old stocking, and buried it in his garden, where Bank note paper couldn’t fail to keep dry, and to come out, when wanted, in the best preservation. After leaving his treasure in this excellent place of deposit for some months, it occurred to the depositor to take a look at it, and see how it was getting on. He found the stocking-foot apparently full of the fragments of mildewed and broken mushrooms. No other shadow of a shade of eighty-seven pounds ten. In the midst of his despair, the man had the sense not to disturb the ashes of his property. He took the stocking-foot in his hand, posted off to the Bank in Dublin, entered it one morning as soon as it was opened, and, staring at the clerk with a most extraordinary absence of all expression in his face, said: “Ah, look at that, Sir! Can ye do anything for me?” “What do you call this?” said the clerk. “Eighty-sivin pound ten, praise the Lord, as I’m a sinner! Ohone! There was a twenty as was paid to me by Mr. Phalim O’Dowd, Sir, and a ten as was changed by Pat Reilly, and a five as was owen by Tim; and Ted Connor, ses he to ould Phillips--”