men are familiar with the
fact. Something always came along to quiet Evan's mind before he had
gone so far as to write an "indiscreet" letter to head office. What a
grand thing it is to be discreet! Why was mention of this attribute,
discretion, omitted from the Apostle's list? What anxiety and sorrow
possession of this virtue would save us--and what enlightenment! ....
Had Evan written an impulsive letter to head office he would have been
ousted from the bank; he would very likely have been metaphorically
kicked out. The kick would have hurt for a while, but not like the
sting that must burn later on. Yet, how was he to foresee that which
was coming? He might have estimated his chances by the experience of
others; but boys, like young nations, do not suffer themselves to be
guided in that way.

The excitement of saving money, as much as anything, now held Evan to
his desk. He was putting away a dollar weekly. By Thanksgiving he
would be able to take a trip home, and incidentally make his mother a
present of the turkey for dinner. If the gobbler Evan plotted against
could only have known how safe his neck was he would have put all the
roosters in the barnyard out of business, and whetted his bill for the
drake. A calamity was destined to befall the young Creek Bend teller;
yet, viewed from the standpoint of its frequency in the business, this
"calamity" deserved only the name of a "professional accident"--for
which there is no provision made in the Rules and Regulations. It
happened in this wise:

A black-whiskered man came in, accompanied by the village hotel-keeper,
with a cheque to be cashed. It was "marked good" by a bank in London,
Ontario. Evan paid it without showing it to the manager. Dunn saw it
afterwards and let it pass for seventy dollars, the amount the customer
received. The figures were a compromise between $20 and $70, but the
"body" of the cheque (what a teller goes by) looked very much like
Seventy. Evan thought no more about the strange-looking customer whom
the hotel-keeper had identified, until the cheque came back from
London, with the following memo: "This was marked for Twenty Dollars
only."

The teller rushed out to the hotel and asked about the man of beard.
The hotel-keeper said he only knew him as an occasional drinker; and
because the hotel-keeper had not endorsed the cheque and needed no loan
from the bank, he waxed impolite. Evan gathered that the shark had
left town