Seeking To Be Identified

________________________________________________
_ CHICAGO, Feb. 20, 1888.

Financial circles here have been a good deal interested in the discovery of a cipher which was 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 great 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 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, 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 of the other 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 moustache comes to me and hisses through his clinched 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 need protection. Go into an hotel or a hotel, whichever suits the eyether and nyether readers 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 to-day 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 week 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." _

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