I have no intention of going to Strasburg, Virginia: I shall instead buy something with this note, under the romantic pretence that the shopkeeper is going to exchange it, in Strasburg, Virginia, for five dollars. And he will part with it to somebody else on the same imaginative terms. And that make-believe will continue until this note is worn out. Meanwhile this bit of paper will gravely be exchanged, in varied surroundings, for every sort of commodity.... It will be transmuted into dinners, it will tread the pavements of remote outlandish cities in the form of a pair of shoes, and as pajamas it will pass beyond the proper scope of my meditations. It will flower into orchids, it will blaze as coal. Not without ostentation will it fall into the collection plate, nor toward Christmas flutter into the kettle of the Salvation Army: more furtively will it, thrice-folded, slip into the top of the feminine stocking. Darkness will sometimes engulf it like a pocket. Very deep will it descend, as fares the sewer rat, into grim social underworlds; as most inferior whiskey it will be swallowed up; and in the manner of the dead that are laid away, will it go down into the steel catacombs beneath banking houses. Thence presently it will arise. It will arise unchanged, a trifle deteriorate in crispness perhaps, yet very potent to aid in lifting mortgages, in raising children, and in elevating many households, I would like to think, in the avatar of two of my books.... But never on any forenoon in Strasburg, Virginia, will it be exchanged for five dollars: and the one purpose for which this paper is so precisely designed is precisely the one to which it will not ever be put. What will in point of fact become of it, I learn after serious inquiry into this mystery--in financial circles, wherein I was humored as a harmless lunatic,--is that, when the note gets sufficiently dirty and decrepit, "some bank will turn it in, at Washington," in exchange for a fresh paper rectangle; and the senior note will then be destroyed by Treasury employees. But nobody will ever convey to Strasburg, Virginia, this representation of Benjamin Harrison looking like a dishonest Santa Claus, and of the Pilgrims putting ashore at Plymouth Rock to investigate the phenomena of a wind that blows two ways and of a tree growing from the ocean. Nobody will ever deal logically with all this intricate engraving: and if anybody ever did, he would, as the very cream of this monetary fiction, be thought "queer." At worst, his sanity would become a matter of medical investigation: at best, he would be given for this paper rectangle another banknote, and the romancing would now gild a different Carcassonne.