Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 249, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 October 1915 — Gales of GOTHAM and other CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Gales of GOTHAM and other CITIES

Gotham Has Great Piles of Gold From England New YORK.—New York has recently got three gold shipments from England, each of about $20,000,000, brought by a fast British cruiser to Halltax and then carried overland with elaborate precautions. The first two consignments were in United States

coin—some we have had to ship over to Europe in other years when the trade balance was the other way. Then the Bank of England evidently ran out of eagles, for the last shipment were $7,850,000 in United States * coins and $11,616,000 id sovereigns. The British treat our eagles most shamefully. They ship them by weight. To bring each bag up to the required heft they chop coins into many triangular bits and add these

piece by piece, tmtil the scales tip. The subtreasury here credits the Importer only with the whole coins and the chips are turned over to the assay office, which melts them up Into bricks. These chips amount to several thousand dollars In the recent three big shipments. As to the sovereigns, the assay office found itself with 2,650,000 on Its The importers were anxious to get the benefit of the amount A law has been passed allowing them to be credited with the sovereigns as bullion without melting them up, but there has been a dispute over the deductions to be made for wear on the coins, dirt, and other considerations which could not be settled, and this has made the law a dead letter. Uncle Sam charges $1 a thousand ounces for melting the gold. This does not cover the ooet by a lot. It takes one’s breath away at first to look around the furnace room of the assay office, for gold is lying about in an apparently most careless way. The sovereigns are heaped into wooden troughs. The furnace men wear heavy woolen shirts and asbestos gloves to protect their bodies from the Intense heat. The gold is melted in rough, three-gallon crucibles which rest upon a grate on which Jets spray crude oil. A fierce flame beats around the crucibles. A workmen seizes a few pounds of gold coins, protects his face with one hand and throws them into the retort. In a few minutes the mass is a golden liquid. Another workman ladles the precious metal into what look like extra large muffin tins. These molds are greased as a cook would do, too, and the lard flames up as the hot gold strikes. The 2,000,000 sovereigns are noks nothing more than a stack of dirty, charcoal smudged bricks, each worth about $7,000. They are smaller than a building brick, but weigh between twenty-five and thirty pounds apiece. They are not as careless as they look at the assay office, however. The gold given to each furnace man is weighed before being given to him and the bricks he produces must contain Just that much metal, with a slight allowance for the disappearance of part of the alloy.