To alter with a pen a 1 into a 4 is an easy task—to cut out the numeral from the date in one note and insert it into another needs only a tyro in paper-cutting; but to change the special number by which each note is distinguished, is a feat only second in impossibility to trumping every court-card of every suit six times running in a rubber of whist. Yet we have seen a note so cleverly altered by this expedient, that it was actually paid by the Bank cashiers. If the reader will take a Bank note out of his purse, and examine its “number,” he will at once appreciate the combination of chances required to find, on any other note, any other figure that shall displace any one of the numerals so as to avoid detections. The “number” of every Bank note is printed twice on one line—first, on the words “I promise,” secondly, on the words, “or bearer.” Sometimes the figures cover the whole of those words—sometimes they only partly obscure them. No. 99066 now lies before us. Suppose we wished to substitute the “0” of another note for the first “9” of the one now under our eye; we see that the “9” covers a little bit of the “P,” and intersects in three places the “r,” in “Promise.” Now, to give this alteration the smallest chance, we must look through hundreds of other notes till we find an “0” which not only covers a part of the “P” and intersects the “r” in three places, but in precisely the same places as the “9” on our note does; else the strokes of those letters would not meet when the “0” was let in, and instant detection would ensue. But even then the job would only be half done. The second initial “9” stands upon the “or” in “or bearer,” and we should have to investigate several hundred more notes, to find an “0” that intersected that little word exactly in the same manner, and then let it in with such mathematical nicety, that not the hundredth part of a hair’s breath of the transferred paper should fail to range with the rest of the letters and figures on the altered note; to say nothing of hiding the joins in the paper. This is the triumph of ambi-dexterity; it is a species of patch-work far beyond the most sublime achievements of “Old Patch” himself.”
Time has proved that the steady perseverance of the Bank—despite the most furious clamor—in gradually improving their original note and thus preserving those most essential qualities, simplicity and uniformity—has been a better preventive to forgery than any one of the hundreds of plans, pictures, complications, chemicals, and colors, which have been forced upon the Directors’ notice. Whole-note forgery is nearly extinct. The lives of Eminent Forgers need only wait for a single addendum; for only one man is left who can claim superiority over Mathison, and he was, unfortunately for the Bank of England, born a little too late, to trip up his heels, or those of the late Mr. Charles Price. He can do everything with a note that the patchers, and alterers, and simulators can do, and a great deal more. Flimsy as a Bank note is to a proverb, he can split it into three perfect continuous, flat, and even leaves. He has forged more than one design sent into the Bank as an infallible preventive to forgery. You may, if you like, lend him a hundred-pound note; he will undertake to discharge every trace of ink from it, and return it to you perfectly uninjured and a perfect blank. We are not quite sure that if you were to burn a Bank note and hand him the black cinders, that he would not bleach it, and join it, and conjure it back again into a very good-looking, payable piece of currency. But we are sure of the truth of the following story, which we have from our friend the transcendent forger referred to, and who is no other than the chief of the Engraving and Engineering department of the Bank of England:—
Some years ago—in the days of the thirty-shilling notes—a certain Irishman saved up the sum of eighty-seven pounds ten, in notes of the Bank of Ireland. As a sure means of securing this valuable property, he put it in the foot of an old stocking, and buried it in his garden, where Bank-note paper couldn’t fail to keep dry, and to come out, when wanted, in the best preservation.
After leaving his treasure in this excellent place of deposit for some months, it occurred to the depositor to take a look at it, and see how it was getting on. He found the stocking-foot apparently full of the fragments of mildewed and broken mushrooms. No other shadow of a shade of eighty-seven pounds ten.
In the midst of his despair, the man had the sense not to disturb the ashes of his property. He took the stocking-foot in his hand, posted off to the Bank in Dublin, entered it one morning as soon as it was opened, and, staring at the clerk with a most extraordinary absence of all expression in his face, said,
“Ah, look at that, sir! Can ye do anything for me?”
“What do you call this?” said the clerk.
“Eighty-siven pound ten, praise the Lord, as I’m a sinner! Ohone! There was a twenty as was paid to me by Mr. Phalim O’Dowd, sir, and a ten as was changed by Pat Rielly, and a five as was owen by Tim; and, Ted Connor, ses he to ould Phillips——”
“Well!—never mind old Phillips. You have done it, my friend!”
“Oh, Lord, sir, and it’s done it I have, most com-plate! Oh, good luck to you, sir; can you do nothing for me?”