“They haven’t got out the circular on the fifty yet; they just ’phoned round about it this morning; and I’ve these two already. Made by the same gang, you see. Same good seal and numbering; printed on the same paper; and also a steel-plate job. One of the old masters did that, Steve; spent weeks and weeks engraving that plate to make that reproduction. He’s none of your modern, lazy, loafing photo-engravers running off notes on a hand press. That’s a Janvier job, I know. A Chicago job, or a western job, anyway. I told Cantrell yesterday. But he still thinks it’s a New York piece of work because the notes appeared down there first. The photo-engraved jobs are done down there; but not pure art like this, I told him. Broadway can’t produce it; look here.” And he picked up a couple of fifty-dollar Federal Reserve notes and went on with his talk. Up to that moment, money had just been money to me; of course I’d noticed, especially since the Federal Reserve notes began coming out, we’d been developing different varieties; and I was aware that each style had figures of its own and that some one--usually a particularly rotten penman--took it upon himself to sign each issue; also I had observed, as a matter of course, that our money ran to pictures of presidents, each labelled so you’d know him, and on the other side they printed unlabelled but occasionally exciting little scenes in green like the landing of Columbus or the wreck of the _Hesperus_. But the fine points of the art work had escaped me. Now it appeared that the government hired expert engravers, not only for esthetic purposes but to make counterfeiting harder. Each issue was printed from steel plates, specially engraved and most particularly guarded. The paper also was specially made by secret process. Now, many years ago, occasionally a real artist and a patient and conscientious workman turned counterfeiter and cut a steel plate as good as the government’s, and then, if he had a fair paper to print on and good ink, he gave the secret service a lot of trouble. “Janvier, some of whose fine work was still in circulation when I started with the bank, was by all odds the best of these,” Wally told me. “The secret service had got him about a year earlier; but his souvenirs were still coming in. His paper betrayed him; he couldn’t make that; he had to use the best he could get and imitate the silk shred lines with colored ink; but his plates were almost perfect--even to the scroll work of the borders, which the government makes by special lathes; his seals and numbers were perfect, even under the microscope; and his portraiture wonderful. He served ten years and then got out and put another series of gold notes in circulation, almost a thousand twenties in spite of being watched, before they got him again for ten more years, at the end of which he engraved the famous ‘living Cleveland’ plate from which the big counterfeit issue of 1912 was printed.