ll leather bags were carefully taken out of a waist-belt, their
contents emptied into a tin can, a number placed in the can, and a
corresponding number given him--no words spoken: in two days he would
return, and, producing his number, receive value in coin. The dust would
all have gone into a good-sized coffee-cup. I asked the officer about
the value. "400l., sir." He had left a New England state some eight
months previous, and was going home to invest in land.

What strikes a stranger most on entering the Mint, is the absence of all
extra defence round it; the building appears as open as any London
house. The process is, of course, essentially the same as elsewhere; but
I was astonished when the director told me that the parties employed in
the establishment are never searched on leaving, though the value of
hundreds of thousands of dollars is daily passing through their hands in
every shape. The water in which the workmen wash their hands runs into a
tank below, and from this water, value to the amount of from 60l. to
80l. is extracted annually. The sweepings, &c., after the most careful
sifting, are packed in casks and sold--chiefly, I believe, to European
Jews--for 4000l. annually. The only peculiarity in the Philadelphian
Mint is a frame-work for counting the number of pieces coined, by which
ingenious contrivance--rendered necessary by Californian pressure--one
man does the work of from twenty to thirty. The operation of weighing
the several pieces of coin being of a delicate nature, it is confided to
the hands of the fair sex, who occupy a room to themselves, where each
daughter of Eve sits with the gravity of a Chancellor opposite a
delicate pair of scales. Most parts of the establishment are open to the
public from ten till two, and they are only excluded from those portions
of the building where intrusion would impede the operations in progress.

This city, like most others in America, is liberally supplied with
water. Magnificent basins are built in a natural mound at Fairmount,
nearly opposite an old family mansion of the Barings, and the water is
forced up into these basins from the river by powerful water-wheels,
worked by the said river, which is dammed up for the purpose of
obtaining sufficient fall, as the stream is sometimes very low.

Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most imposing sight in
the neighbourhood of Philadelphia, is "The Gerard College." So singular
and successful a career