I cried out, "stop, stop—give me breath—do you mean to say," said I, "that there are four million of pounds in these four packages—twenty million of dollars?"
"That is what I mean," said the polite official, and he smiled slightly at the excitement which he saw in my features.
At that moment I did not envy C. Vanderbilt, and I despised Jim Fisk.
Dim thoughts of murder flashed across my brain—and yet, no—I banished it from my mind. Twenty million of dollars! But then, the Tower! Ha-ha—away, fell design.
In one week the issue of bank notes amount to twenty-five million of pounds, or one hundred and twenty-five million of dollars. During the last twelve months the Bank has purchased three million and a half pounds' worth of gold bars, and one million eight hundred pounds' worth of silver bars. During the same period it sold six million pounds' worth of gold bars, and a quarter of a million pounds' worth of silver' bars.
MAKING SOVEREIGNS.
In the Weighing Office, established in 1842, to detect light gold, is the ingenious machine invented by Mr. W. Cotton, then Deputy-Governor of the Bank. About 80 or 100 light and heavy sovereigns are placed indiscriminately in a round tube; as they descend on the machinery beneath, those which are light receive a slight touch, which moves them into their proper receptacle, and those which are of legitimate weight pass into their appointed place. The light coins are then defaced by a machine, 200 in a minute; and by the weighing-machinery 35,000 may be weighed in one day. There are six of these machines, which from 1844 to 1849 weighed upwards of 48,000,000 pieces without any inaccuracy. The average amount of gold tendered in one year is nine millions, of which more than a quarter is light. The silver is put up into bags, each of one hundred pounds value, and the gold into bags of a thousand; and then these bagsful of bullion are sent through a strongly guarded door, or rather window, into the Treasury, a dark, gloomy apartment, fitted up with iron presses, supplied with huge locks and bolts.
And now I was to behold the process. After leaving the Treasury vaults, where I was shown the Bank notes, I was taken to a very large room on an upper floor, in which was a small and elegant steam engine, with other intricate machines, for weighing and defacing, or marking coins.
There was a large table with a number of coin shovels, and its entire surface was covered with sovereigns, heaped a foot high, the table having a raised rim all around it.
They were weighing these sovereigns—these officials with the finely starched shirts and white neck-ties; and this was the manner of it: