e he may succeed well enough to deceive
the ordinary man, but is rarely successful in baffling the expert.
Even the most skilful culprit cannot wholly hide his individuality, as
he is sure to relapse into his ordinary method occasionally. Then
again, great care has to be used, and this can be detected by the
traces of hesitancy, the substitution of curves for angles and _vice
versa_, which come out very plainly when the writing is examined under
the microscope, as it usually is by the expert.

A plan of detection which has been adopted with great success is to
cut out each letter in a doubtful piece of writing, and paste all the
A's, B's, etc., on separate sheets of paper. The process is also gone
through with a genuine bit of caligraphy of the imitator or the
imitated, as the case may be. Comparison almost invariably shows that
the letters are less uniform if imitation has been attempted, the
writer being occasionally betrayed into some approach to his ordinary
caligraphy, or into momentary forgetfulness of some special point in
the handwriting he is simulating.

No point is too small to escape an expert's attention. The dotting of
the "i's," the crossing of "t's," the curls and flourishes, the
intervals between the words, the thinness of the up-stroke and the
thickness of the down-stroke, are all noted and carefully compared.
Where only a signature has been forged, and that by means of tracings
from the original the resemblance is often so exact as to deceive even
the supposed author, but in these cases the microscope is generally
effective in determining not merely the forgery but the method by
which it was accomplished. It is some comfort to know that the cunning
of the forger is overmatched by the scientific skill of the trained
expert.

CHAPTER XXIV

HOW FORGERS ALTER BANK NOTES

Bankers Easily Deceived--How Ten One Hundred-Dollar Bills Are Made out
of Nine--How to Detect Altered Bank Notes--Making a Ten-Dollar Bill
out of a Five--A Ten Raised to Fifty--How Two-Dollar Bills are Raised
to a Higher Denomination--Bogus Money in Commercial Colleges--Action
of the United States Treasury Department--Engraving a Greenback--How
They Are Printed--Making a Vignette--Beyond the Reach of Rascals--How
Bank Notes Are Printed, Signed and Issued by the Government--Safeguards
to Foil Forgers, Counterfeiters and Alterers of Bank Notes--Devices to
Raise Genuine Bank Notes--Split Notes--Altering Silver Certificates.