The life of a French bank note is said to average two or three years, and does not terminate until the condition is very shaky indeed--crimpled, pierced with pinholes, corner creases torn, soft, tarnished, decrepit while yet young. Some have been half-burned; one has been found half-digested in the stomach of a goat, and one boiled in a waistcoat-pocket by a laundress. No matter; the cashier at the bank will do his best to decipher it; he will indeed take an infinity of trouble to put together the ashes of a burned note, and will give the owner a new note or the value in coin, if satisfied of the integrity of the old one. The bank authorities preserve specimens of this kind as curiosities, minute fragments gummed in their proper position on a sheet of paper. Very few of the notes are actually and irrevocably lost. During the last sixty-seven years 24,000 bank notes of 1,000 francs each have been issued, and of this number 23,958 had been returned to the bank by the month of January 1869, leaving only 42 unaccounted for. Whether these 42 are still in existence, or have seen burned into uncollected ashes, or are at the bottom of the sea, or elsewhere, is not known. Of 500-franc notes, 24,935 have been returned out of 25,000. The bank holds itself morally and financially responsible for the small number of notes unreturned, ready to cash them if at any time presented. The bank sends the old notes again and again into circulation, if verified and usable; but they are examined first, and any that are found too defective are canceled by stamping a hole in them. These canceled notes pass from one official to another, and are grouped in classified bundles; the book that records the birth of each note now receives a notification of its civil death, and after three years incarceration in a great oak chest, a grand conflagration takes place. A huge fire is kindled in an open court; the defunct notes are thrown into a sort of revolving wire-cage over the fire; the cage is kept rotating; and the minute fragments of ash, whirled out of the cage through the meshes, take their flight into infinite space--no one knows whither. The Bank of France prints a certain number of notes per day, and destroys a smaller number, so as to have always in reserve a sufficient supply of new notes to meet any emergency; but the actual burning, the grand flare-up takes place only about once a month, when perhaps 150,000 will be burned at once. The French go down to lower denominations than the Rank of England, having notes of 100 francs and 50 francs, equivalent to £4 and £2. There must be a great deal of printing always going on in the Bank of France, seeing that in 1868 they issued 2,711 000 notes, of an aggregate value of 904,750,000 francs (averaging about £13 each), and burned 1,927,192, value 768,854,900 francs.