Following our dollar, we come this soft summer morning to the Division of Issues. It is in the Treasurer’s Bureau, and here, crisp, new and ready for its adventures, our dollar has arrived. The fate that may await it out in the world, the wildest fancy cannot foretell; but before it starts on its long pilgrimage, it must be again manipulated by fair fingers, to see that it starts “all right.” We enter a long, light, airy room; and here at a table sit forty or more maids and matrons, counting the new notes. Pretty maidens! Pretty dollars! Our dollar among the rest. Crinkling, fluttering, flying, the dollars! Serene, silent, swift, the maidens! That anything can be counted so rapidly and yet so accurately, defies belief. It is the marvel of this counting, that it is as infallible as it is flying. The fingers of forty women play the part of perfected machinery, the numbered notes passing through them with the celerity and regularity of automatic action. This perfection of mathematical movement is acquired only by long practice and by one order of intellect. There are persons who can never acquire this unerring accuracy of mind and motion combined. There is a lady sitting here who has been in this division since it was organized, in 1862, who can, upon demand, count fifty thousand notes in one day. As the department hours of work are from nine to three o’clock, and half an hour is taken at noon for lunch, these fifty thousand notes must all be counted in the space of five and a half hours. This is at a rate of nine thousand and ninety notes each hour, one hundred and fifty each minute and two and a half each second. The same lady will count four thousand legal tender notes in twenty minutes. These lady counters, with a number of their sister peers from the Redemption Division, perform numerous journeys for Uncle Samuel whenever the Treasury Offices in other cities need a “looking over.” At such times they are “detailed” to go and count the Government funds there. Through the fingers of these ladies has passed every note—legal tender or fractional—which has been issued by the United States since the beginning of the war of the rebellion. Every note, ever touched or seen, with all the gold-notes and the millions of imperfect bonds and notes never put in circulation—every one has passed through these same deft fingers. The total value of this vast amount, up to July, 1872, was about two thousand nine hundred million dollars, more than two hundred and twenty-three millions of which was in postal and fractional currency. As soon as the new money is counted, it is again put away—the legal tenders in strong paper wrappers, the fractional currency in paper boxes. All are sealed, put on a hand-cart, and rolled off to the vaults of the cash division, whither we still, you and I, pursue our little dollar.