THE COUNTERFEIT COIN.*

I.

Late one Saturday afternoon, in a certain December, I sat by a good sea-coal fire in my office, trying to muster courage enough for an encounter with the cold winds and driving storm outside. Half ashamed to confess my cowardice to myself, I had done every unnecessary thing I could think of to kill time, till, at last, I was reduced to the necessity of counting over the contents of my purse. This, however, was but a brief resource. 'A short horse,' as the proverb hath it, 'is soon curried.' The only coin worth lingering on was a bright, new half-eagle, given me that morning by some chance customer, as my recompense for 'doing a deed.'

Limited as my practice and my fees had always been, half-eagles were not entirely a novelty to me; and yet, from the prolonged attention with which, in my procrastinating frame of mind, I regarded it, a looker-in might have supposed I was studying some rare antique, instead of a very ordinary specimen of Uncle Sam's daily-spending money. I examined it chronologically, with reference to the date, and geographically, in respect to the mark of the mint whence it issued. I compared the eagle on the one side, with my remembrance of such ornithological specimens as I had seen in travelling museums, and of the effigy then solemnly believed to be of solid gold-which, in my boyish days, kept watch and ward over Tommy Townsend's coffee-house. I scrutinised the head of liberty with the eye of a physiognomist; and, in attempting, with a sharppointed pen-knife, to give the hybrid profile a more feminine mouth, I accomplished sundry scratches which might very well have passed for a moustache, besides cutting my fingers, and breaking at once the knife-blade and the third command

ment.

A knock at the door checked the halfuttered malediction, and was only repeated when I cried, 'Come in.' Had spiritual rappings been invented then, I might have thought that Satan, his patience exhausted by this new development of wickedness, was about to foreclose the mortgage he is popularly supposed to hold on every member of our profession; as it was, I only rose and

• 'Putnam's American Magazine.'

opened the door. The ruddy firelight streamed out into the dark entry, and fell upon a slight figure that seemed almost the embodiment of its coldness and gloom. The figure, however, was too familiar to me to inspire any supernatural fears, being that of a young woman who earned a scant livelihood by copying for lawyers. Why need I describe her! An employment requiring easy penmanship, and some acquaintance with commas and periods, if not with the more essential parts of composition, falls almost, as a matter of course, to those who, at some period, have had greater advantages -to those who, in that common but most touching phrase, 'have known better days.' The result is easily guessed. It might be told in many a tale of patient suffering and labour; of bright eyes dimmed with late watching; of red cheeks blanched to the hue of the paper before them; of young hopes withered and shrunk, till they are as lifeless and void of meaning, to the weary heart, as the dry legal phrases of the copy to the tired hand that transcribes them!

And while I had been lingering idly by my fire, dreading to face the storm, this scantily-clad girl had walked all the way from her distant garret. She did not tell me that she was weary and chilled to the very heart; but I read it in her pinched face, in the frozen sleet which covered her dress of faded mourning, and in the eagerness with which she drew toward the fire, as a starving man would approach food. Ill protected as she was from the storm, she had managed to cover the papers she brought from its drenching, with a care which told, more strongly than any words, the importance to her of the trifling sum she was to receive for the copying. This was the first time I had ever employed her. In fact, I did not often find it necessary to obtain such extraneous aid in getting through my business; and the present occasion was due less to the pressure of my own occupations, than to the whims of one of my best clients, who had declared, that he would see me in a still worse place than Wall Street, before he would spend time in deciphering my legal chirography, or the schoolboy pothooks and hangers of my only and very juvenile clerk.

I took the package and ran my eye over its contents. They were written in

a neat, plain hand, just stiff enough to show that the consciousness of copying for a lawyer had marred the writer's ease. As copies they were scrupulously correct, and finished even to the numbering of the folios in the margin. I silently reckoned the price, and, as I did, it occurred to me that I could only pay it that evening by the sacrifice of my halfeagle. It was in vain that once more I opened my purse, which certainly was not Fortunatus's, for I found nothing more there than I had seen in it an hour beforesmall change of the very smallest variety. Could I put her off until Monday? Without that half-eagle, my Saturday night's marketing would be a very small affair.

'But what will hers be without it?' said my conscience. 'If you feel the inconvenience of an empty pocket so much, what must it be to those who earn food and shelter from day to day? Daily bread is something more than a mere form of speech to them!'

Perhaps a little would serve her immediate wants. Selfishness received this suggestion very approvingly; and I turned from my papers to the copyist to make the suggestion.

She stood on the other side of the fireplace, as motionless as if she had been a carved pillar placed there to support the mantel, against which her shoulder rested. One foot a neat one, even in its worn, wet shoe-peeped from beneath her dress, as if drawn irresistibly toward the grateful warmth. Indeed, her whole attitude seemed to express the same feeling. She did not bend and couch over the fire as a beggar would have done. She did not sit before it and court its cheerful heat as if it had blazed on her own hearth-stone. Scarcely swerving from the most erect position, as she leaned against the marble, her clasped hands hanging before her, she seemed to be bracing herself against an attraction that would draw her completely into the flame. I could almost fancy that, if left to herself, her slender form would be drawn closer and closer, till finally it mingled with the flickering blaze, and with it passed into viewless air.

But when I lifted my eyes to her face, I saw that she was at least unconscious of the fancied impulse. Her fixed eyes and a faint smile on her lip, told that some pleasant thought had beguiled her even there into a day-dream. Following the direction of her gaze, I saw that it rested on the same solitary coin which had

been the subject of my own meditations, and which lay just where I had dropped it on the table when startled by her knock.

Modern critics are very fond of talking about the suggestive in art and literature. To my own mind (because it is hackneyed and worldly, I suppose they would say), there is no word in the language so suggestive as money—no work of art that brings up so many and so varied thoughts as those very remarkable profiles and effigies which adorn our current coin. Dross in itself, if the philosophers will have it so; yet, as a means, a tool, a path, is it not wonderful in the versatility of its power? What magician ever worked such wonders in the material world? What spirit works so universally, so unfailingly, so unceasingly in the moral? Even that single coin on my table—that infinitesimal drop in the great ocean of wealth-how much lies within the circumference of such a small piece of metal? To my own mind-worldly and hackneyed, as I have before observed-it had been suggestive of a great many things. Compressed within its disk, I had seen my Sunday dinner, ample, done to a turn, rich with dripping gravy, and smoking hot from the roasting jack. From its metallic rim I had already sipped in imagination the rare old Amon tillado. A fragment of the gold had curled my lips in fragrant wreaths of smoke. And if I, to whom half-eagles were not unfrequent visiters, and who, if I had known poverty at all, had known him only as a neighbour to be shunned, and not as an inmate to be fought; who, even in my worst estate, had been spared the pain of seeing him enter at my own door, and sit down with my dear ones at their scant meal; if I could see so much in a half-eagle, what a worldwide prospect of happiness might it not open to that poor girl's eyes? I dared not dwell on the things she might see there, lest I should loathe myself and the well-fed Christian men around me, who so rarely grant such visions to the starved eyesight; but I immediately gave up all thoughts of sending the girl away without her money.

Yes, her money! For hers it was, by all that can make good title in law or equity; earned by the fragment of her young life she had given for it; earned with the very flesh from her wasted frame, and the blood from her pale cheeks.

What business had I to be speculating and sentimentalising thus about the affairs of a young lady, with whom I had only a little business transaction? I might have known that such an unprofessional train of thought would lead to some blunder; the earthen pot and the iron one never can swim safely together, in fact or fable. Consequently, I broke in upon the poor girl's reverie with the most awkward question in the world:

'Have you any change, miss?'

The scarlet blood rushed to her face as she shook her head; and mine was already on its way there, when I tried to mend the matter by hurrying out:

'No, no, of course you haven't!' And there I stuck; and if ever a middle-aged counsellor-at-law felt like a fool in his own office, I did.

Her eyes were filled with tears at what must have seemed the rudeness of my remark. I could have gone on my knees to ask her pardon, if I had only known in what words to phrase the entreaty. The scene was so embarrassing, that I cut it short by pressing the coin into her hand, and telling her that we would make it all right if she would come for more work on Monday. Very likely she would have said something in reply; but not feeling inclined to test my conversational powers further, after such an unlucky beginning, I hastily bade her goodnight, and opened the door.

When her back was fairly turned, I took my candle and held it at the stairhead till she had reached the bottom of the last long flight; and then, going back to my arm-chair, wondered what Mrs Quidam would say to a cold Sunday dinner.

II.

If that rascally boy of mine has not made a good fire,' said I to myself, as I walked down town the Monday morning following, 'I shall certainly give him the thrashing in which I have stood indebted to him so long?'

From this novel species of accord and satisfaction, however, the much-thereofdeserving youth was saved by an unexpected incident. Seated by the cheerless and neglected grate, as I entered, I beheld my visiter of the preceding Saturday night. Her pale sad face was even paler and sadder than before, and I thought there were tears in her eyes, and traces of many that had preceded them. But perhaps this was owing to

the smoke now pouring from the mass of paper and wet wood, with which Tom, as usual, greeted my arrival.

'I am sorry to tell you, sir,' she said, after answering my salutation, that the coin you gave me was a bad one.'

A bad one-my beautiful half-eagle a counterfeit! In what of earth can confidence then be placed? I took it in my hand; it certainly had every appearance of being genuine.

'Positively, you must be mistaken, my dear. I could not be deceived so easily.' And feeling that I undoubtedly appeared to her as a gentleman, whom the daily inspection of unlimited gold coin had made a perfect Sir Oracle upon the subject, I drew myself up before the fire, 'As who should say,

Let no dog bark.'

Her lip quivered as she replied: 'Indeed, sir, I am very, very sorry; but it must be so, for you know I had no other but that.'

'And pray, how did you learn it to be a counterfeit?'

'When I left here, sir, I went directly up to-to a place where some of our things were: I went to pay the little sum we had borrowed on them when my mother was taken sick, and the man took the half-eagle, and said it was a counterfeit, and gave it back to me.'

'Nonsense, child, the man was mistaken.'

She did not argue the point; but made a brief apology for the trouble she had given me, and hesitated.

'I trust,' said I, still somewhat grandiloquent and condescending, as a man whose resources have unjustly been suspected, 'that the fellow's stupidity has caused you no inconvenience?'

A bright hectic flush crossed her pale cheek, as an instinctive denial rose to her lips. Further than that the falsehood could not come; her head sunk between her hands, and the poor girl, weak, and cold, and starving, as I afterwards knew, sobbed violently.

Little by little I learned her sad story. It need not be repeated here; it lacks, alas! the charm of novelty. Years of still deepening poverty-and yesterday, when Mrs Quidam and I were grumbling at our leg of cold mutton, this poor child and her sick mother passed the long cold day without food or fire; even the warm clothes and bedding which this money was to have redeemed from the

pawnbroker's, denied to their shivering limbs.

I put on my hat, and stepped over to Bullion's, to get change for the halfeagle. The clerk threw it carelessly on a balance, and had already handed me the change, when he saw that the delicate arm, after vibrating a little, did not decline with the weight. He took it up, and handed it to the head of the firm, and, after a short consultation between them, I was asked into the inner office. A chemical test soon proved the worthless character of the coin. Bullion asked me if I knew where I had received it.

'Certainly.

'I have seen two or three of late precisely like it. The counterfeit is a dexterous one, and we have in vain tried to trace its origin. If you can assist us in this, it will be a great service to the community.'

I took up the deceptive coin, and scrutinised it curiously. The workmanship was perfect; the thought at once flashed across my mind, too perfect; where was the knife-mark I myself had made? I could not be deceived-the coin had certainly been changed. And this was the end of all my fine sentiment about the interesting young girl!

In a few words I communicated the circumstances connected with it to Mr Bullion, who jumped at once to the conclusion.

'I thought so,' said he, 'I thought so! I knew that some fresh and unsuspected parties must be made use of in this business. The old hands we know too well,' he added, with a chuckle.

It was soon agreed between us that the girl should be detained, and no time lost in extracting from her a confession as to the persons whose tool she undoubtedly

was.

We accordingly repaired together to my office, where we found her patiently waiting. In answer to my questions, she repeated her story, with much apparent frankness, until I asked the name of the person to whom she had of fered the coin. After some hesitation, she named a very respectable pawnbroker, in C- Street, to whom, as well as to the police-office, a messenger was immediately despatched.

Mr Forceps soon came, and we received him in another apartment. His answers to the inquiries we made com

pletely confirmed our suspicions. Such a coin as we showed him (the counterfeit) had been offered to him, on the previous Saturday night, by a young woman; and, on being confronted with our prisoner (for such we now considered her), he at once recognised her as the same. Her own frightened, pallid face would have satisfied us of the fact. Half rising, as if to speak, she caught sight of a police-officer, just entering the door, and she fainted.

I went home that night ill-pleased with my day's work. That the girl was guilty seemed but too clear. But I could not believe that she was anything more than an instrument, and my experience in criminal law, slight as it was, taught me how slender the chances were of arresting the guilty parties. Had we obtained a confession before she fainted, something might have been done; but now the matter had got into the hands of the police, such shrewd rascals, as they evidently were, would pretty surely get wind of it in time to escape.

'And so the whole upshot of the matter,' said I to myself, 'will be the ruin of the young woman, and an article in tomorrow's paper, which, for the effect it will have, might as well be inserted under the head 'Personal,' and read thus:

'If the gentlemen who have been in the habit of employing a young person, in faded mourning, to disseminate fallacious half-eagles in this community, do not find it convenient to remove their business for the present to some other place, they will incur the danger of being involved in the unfortunate disaster which has befallen her.'

And this Mr Leguleius Quidam,' I concluded, 'is the great service to the community which you and Mrs Quidam have rendered!'

An officer had called in the afternoon, to tell me that the prisoner's residence had been found and searched, but that no further discoveries had been made. This, however, enabled me to find the unfortunate mother, and provide some scanty comforts for her in her terrible affliction. In doing this, I felt that I was but performing a duty. Society, I reasoned with myself, finds it needful for its own protection to take the guilty daughter and shut her up in jail; but the daughter is the innocent mother's only support; ergo, society must take that daughter's place. And as I felt