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Show EXTRA FINEGOLD DUST Kept in a Table Drawer at the Government Govern-ment Printing Office Under the Eye of a Charming Girl. TRAVELING FOE THE EIEST TIME. Inventions Tor Smokers-Scotch CharacterItems Charac-terItems and Notes of Interest ' Tor the Times' Headers. seven thousand dollars' worth of gold flust in a table drawer! Poke your fingers fin-gers into the yellow stuff and notice ho w soft and agreeable to the feeling it is, while the attenclsnt in charge watches you carefully and Jtees that you do not got away with uny of it. It is smooth to the touch because it is all composed of gold beaters' film, rubbed to almost impalpable im-palpable powder. For tho same reason, too, it is absolutely pure and virgin metal, twenty-four carats fine. The drawer is in charge of a pretty j young girl at the government printing office. Her work there is to stamp gold lettering nnd ornamentation upon book i covers. The precious substance comes to her in the shape of little rectangular sheets of foil inexpressibly thin, laid between be-tween layers of tissue paper made up to book form, each book holding twenty-four twenty-four gold sheets. Handling them is a matter requiring great skill, though you might not imagine it from casual inspection. inspec-tion. To begin with, say tho young woman wom-an places on the table before her an ordinary ordi-nary leather book cover. She takes from the little gold book a sheet of the foil, not with her fingers, but by catching it up with a, small pad of raw cotton. Laying down tho sheet of pure yellow gold upon a little slab, she cuts it into three pieces with a sharp knife. Sho makes it smooth by blowing gently upon it with her breath. One of the pieces she applies to the back of the cover where the title is to go; another she also puts on the back where the name of the author is to be, while the third biggest piece is spread over tho middle of one flap of tho cover, where an ornamental design is wanted. Tho oporator is very careful in rubbing off the loose gold after each stamping, so as to loso none of it. As she uses the leather tipped stick she permits the yellow yel-low stuff to fall through a crack in the tablo top into tho drawer beneath in the shape of dust. It is allowed to accumulate accumu-late there until the drawer is full. The drawer is quite big and deep, and will hold $10,000 worth of the dust. You would not imagine it to be any very precious pre-cious substance if you found a quantity of it in Borne odd place; it looks as much like powderod tinsel as anything else. However, it is worth 20 an ounce, and when a drawer full is collected the nold. is forwarded to the mint in Philadelphia, which subjects it to assay and sends a check for its value. The young woman is held responsible for the safety of the gold in the drawer. She carries the key to it about with her always, and nobody but herself is allowed al-lowed nccess to it. There does not seem to be any reason why she should not slyly sly-ly pocket n small quantity of it occasionally occa-sionally if she desired, though tho number num-ber of books of gold foil charged against her do serve as some sort ot check in the account as to the metal employed in this way. Washington Star. |