credit. The cook broke one of them by mistake, and then threw up
the portfolio of pie-founder in our once joyous home. I will not
dock you for loss of cook, but I cannot allow you for the eggs. How
you succeed in dodging quarantine with eggs like that is a mystery
to yours truly,

W.

Great excitement followed the discovery of this indorsement on a check
for $32.87. Everybody who knew anything about ciphering was called in to
consider it. A young man from a high school near here, who made a
specialty of mathematics and pimples, and who could readily tell how
long a shadow a nine-pound ground-hog would cast at 2 o'clock and 37
minutes p. m., on ground-hog day, if sunny, at the town of Fungus, Dak.,
provided latitude and longitude and an irregular mass of red chalk be
given to him, was secured to jerk a few logarithms in the interests of
trade. He came and tried it for a few days, covered the interior of the
Exposition Building with figures and then went away.

The Pinkerton detectives laid aside their literary work on the great
train book, entitled "The Jerkwater Bank Robbery and other Choice
Crimes," by the author of "How I Traced a Lame Man through Michigan and
other Felonies." They grappled with the cipher, and several of them
leaned up against something and thought for a long time, but they could
make neither head nor tail to it. Ignatius Donnelly took a powerful dose
of kumiss, and under its maddening influence sought to solve the great
problem which threatened to engulf the national surplus. All was in
vain. Cowed and defeated, the able conservators of coin, who require a
man to be identified before he can draw on his overshoes at sight, had
to acknowledge if this thing continued it threatened the destruction of
the entire national fabric.

About this time I was calling at the First National Bank of Chicago, the
greatest bank, if I am not mistaken, in America. I saw the bonds
securing its issue of national currency the other day in Washington, and
I am quite sure the custodian told me it was the greatest of any bank in
the Union. Anyway, it was sufficient, so that I felt like doing my
banking business there whenever it became handy to do so.

I asked for a certificate of deposit for $2,000, and had the money to
pay for it, but I had to be identified. "Why," I said to the receiving
teller, "surely you don't require a man to be identified when he
deposits money, do you?"

"Yes, t