sovereign or two stuck inside or not; this done, he begins to shovel it out, and pay away. He counts sovereigns by twos and threes at a time; you feel confident that he must have given you either too many or too few, he appears so negligent: you count, and there they are to one--he never makes a mistake. Go and pay in a sum of money, or take up a bill, with gold that looks light, and you will see another of his sleight-of-hand tricks. He jerks the one out of the scale without touching it, except with the sovereign he puts in, with such rapidity that you cannot catch the action, cannot see how it is done; the sovereign seems to fly in and out as if by magic. You might try for months and never be able to catch that peculiar jerk. You fancy that he must be weary of counting sovereigns; that a good pile of dirty brown coppers would be a great relief to him, equal at least to a change of diet. You wonder that his countenance is not yellow through bending over such piles of coin, and that, like the buttercups in the meadows steeped in sunshine, his face does not "Give back gold for gold." Sometimes these clerks are kept for hours beyond their usual time to rectify an error of sixpence in the balance, when during the day thousands of pounds have been entered. The mistake rests somewhere, and must be discovered before they quit the banking-house; and column after column is gone over again; that weary array of figures is summed up and up, and compared and called over until the mistake is righted. They would gladly pay the amount twenty times over to get away; but that would be the ruin of a system the very stability of which rests upon its being correct to the "uttermost farthing." The following picture of an old-fashioned banker we select from a recent work on _Banks and Bankers_: "He bore little resemblance to his modern successor: he was a man of serious manners, plain apparel, the steadiest conduct, and a rigid observer of formalities. As you looked in his face, you could read, in intelligible characters, that the ruling maxim of his life, the one to which he turned all his thoughts, and by which he shaped all his actions, was, that he who would be trusted with the money of other men, should look as if he deserved the trust, and be an ostensible pattern to society of probity, exactness, frugality, and decorum. He lived the greater part of the year at his banking-house, was punctual to the hours of business, and always to be found at his desk."