Chicago, Feb. 20,1888.
|FINANCIAL circles here have been a good deal interested in the
discovery of a cipher which has been recently adopted by a depositor and
which began to attract the attention at first of a gentleman employed
in the Clearing House. He was telling me about it and showing me the
vouchers or duplicates of them.
It was several months ago that he first noticed on the back of a check
passing through the Clearing-House the following cipher, written in a
symmetrical Gothic hand:
_Dear Sir: Herewith find payment for last month's butter. It was hardly
up to the average. Why do you blonde your butter? Your butter last month
tried to assume an effeminate air, which certainly was not consistent
with its vigor. Is it not possible that this butter is the brother to
what we had the month previous, and that it was exchanged for its sister
by mistake? We have generally liked your butter very much, but we will
have to deal elsewhere if you are going to encourage it in wearing a
full beard. Yours truly, W._
Moneyed men all over Chicago and financial cryptogrammers came to
read the curious thing and to try and work out its bearing on trade.
Everybody took a look at it, and went away defeated. Even the men who
were engaged in trying to figure out the identity of the Snell murderer
took a day off and tried their Waterbury thinkers on this problem. In
the midst of it all another check passed through the Clearing House with
this cipher, in the same hand:
_Sir: Your bill for the past month is too much. You forget the eggs
returned at the end of second week, for which you were to give me
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 groundhog would cast at 2 o'clock and 37
minutes p.m., on groundhog 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 Jerk-water Bank Bobbery 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 nation's 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, that's the idea."
"Well, isn't that a new twist on the crippled industries of this
country?"
"No; that's our rule. Hurry up, please, and don't keep men waiting who
have money and know how to do business."
"Well, I don't want to obstruct business, of course, but suppose, for
instance, I get myself identified by a man I know and a man you know and
a man who can leave his business and come here for the delirious joy
of identifying me, and you admit that I am the man I claim to be,
corresponding as to description, age, sex, etc., with the man I
advertise myself to be, how would it be about your ability to identify
yourself as the man you claim to be? I go all over Chicago, visiting
all the large pork-packing houses in search of a man I know, and who is
intimate with literary people like me, and finally we will say, I find
one who knows me and who knows you, and whom you know, and who can leave
his leaf lard long enough to come here and identify me all right. Can
you identify yourself in such a way that when I put in my $2,000 you
will not loan it upon insufficient security, as they did in Cincinnati
the other day, as soon as I go out of town?"
"Oh, we don't care especially whether you trade here or not, so that you
hurry up and let other people have a chance. Where you make a mistake is
in trying to rehearse a piece here instead of going out to Lincoln Park
or somewhere in a quiet part of the city. Our rules are that a man who
makes a deposit here must be identified."
"All right. Do you know Queen Victoria?"
"No sir; I do not."
"Well, then, there is no use in disturbing her. Do you know any other of
the crowned heads?"
"No sir."
"Well, then, do you know President Cleveland, or any of the Cabinet, or
the Senate or members of the House?"
"No."
"That's it, you see. I move in one set and you in another. What
respectable people do you know?"
"I'll have to ask you to stand aside, I guess, and give that string of
people a chance. You have no right to take up my time in this way. The
rules of the bank are inflexible. We must know who you are, even before
we accept your deposit."
I then drew from my pocket a copy of the Sunday _World_ which contained
a voluptuous picture of myself. Removing my hat and making a court
salaam by letting out four additional joints in my lithe and versatile
limbs, I asked if any further identification would be necessary.
Hastily closing the door to the vault and jerking the combination, he
said that would be satisfactory. I was then permitted to deposit in the
bank.
I do not know why I should always be regarded with suspicion wherever
I go. I do not present the appearance of a man who is steeped in crime,
and yet when I put my trivial, little, two-gallon valise on the seat
of a depot waiting-room a big man with a red mustache comes to me and
hisses through his clenched teeth: "Take yer baggage off the seat!" It
is so everywhere. I apologize for disturbing a ticket agent long enough
to sell me a ticket, and he tries to jump through a little brass wicket
and throttle me. Other men come in and say: "Give me a ticket for
Bandoline, O., and be dam sudden about it, too," and they get their
ticket and go aboard the car and get the best seat, while I am begging
for the opportunity to buy a seat at full rates and then ride in the
wood box. I believe that common courtesy and decency in America needs
protection. Go into an hotel or a hotel, whichever suits the eyether and
nyether reader of these lines, and the commercial man who travels for a
big sausage-casing house in New York has the bridal chamber, while the
meek and lowly minister of the Gospel gets a wall-pocket room with a
cot, a slippery-elm towel, a cake of cast-iron soap, a disconnected
bell, a view of the laundry, a tin roof and $4 a day.
But I digress. I was speaking of the bank check cipher. At the First
National Bank I was shown another of these remarkable indorsements. It
read as follows:
_Dear Sir: This will be your pay for chickens and other fowls received
up to the first of the present month. Time is working' wondrous changes
in your chickens. They are not such chickens as we used to get of you
before the war. They may be the same chickens, but oh! how changed by
the lapse of time! How much more indestructible! How they have learned
since then to defy the encroaching tooth of remorseless ages, or any
other man! Why do you not have them tender like your squashes! I found a
blue poker chip in your butter this week. What shall I credit myself for
it? If you would try to work your butter more and your customers less it
would be highly appreciated, especially by, yours truly, W._
Looking at the signature on the check itself, I found it to be that of
Mrs. James Wexford, of this city. Knowing Mr. Wexford, a wealthy and
influential publisher here, I asked him today if he knew anything about
this matter. He said that all he knew about it was that his wife had a
separate bank account, and had asked him several months ago what was the
use of all the blank space on the back of a check, and why it couldn't
be used for correspondence with the remittee. Mr. Wexford said he'd bet
$500 that his wife had been using her checks that way, for he said
he never knew of a woman who could possibly pay postage on a note,
remittance or anything else unless every particle of the surface had
been written over in a wild, delirious, three-story hand. Later on I
found that he was right about it. His wife had been sassing the grocer
and the butter-man on the back of her checks. Thus ended the great bank
mystery.
I will close this letter with a little incident the story of which
may not be so startling, but it is true. It is a story of child faith.
Johnny Quinlan, of Evanston, has the most wonderful confidence in the
efficacy of prayer, but he thinks that prayer does not succeed unless
it is accompanied with considerable physical strength. He believes
that adult prayer is a good thing, but doubts the efficacy of juvenile
prayer.
He has wanted a Jersey cow for a good while, and tried prayer, but
it didn't seem to get to the central office. Last year he went to a
neighbor who is a Christian and believer in the efficacy of prayer, also
the owner of a Jersey cow.
"Do you believe that prayer will bring me a yaller Jersey cow?" said
Johnny.
"Why, yes, of course. Prayer will remove mountains; it will do anything.
"Well, then, suppose you give me the cow you've got and pray for another
one."