Page:Keeban (IA keeban00balm).pdf/175

 same gang, you see. Same good seal and numbering; printed on the same paper; and also a steel-plate job. One of the old masters did that, Steve; spent weeks and weeks engraving that plate to make that reproduction. He's none of your modern, lazy, loafing photo-engravers running off notes on a hand press. That's a Janvier job, I know. A Chicago job, or a western job, anyway. I told Cantrell yesterday. But he still thinks it's a New York piece of work because the notes appeared down there first. The photoengraved jobs are done down there; but not pure art like this, I told him. Broadway can't produce it; look here." And he picked up a couple of fifty-dollar Federal Reserve notes and went on with his talk.

Up to that moment, money had just been money to me; of course I'd noticed, especially since the Federal Reserve notes began coming out, we'd been developing different varieties; and I was aware that each style had figures of its own and that some one—usually a particularly rotten penman—took it upon himself to sign each issue; also I had observed, as a matter of course, that our money ran to pictures of presidents, each labelled so you'd know him, and on the other side they printed unlabelled but occa-