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Show It Is Still Perfect H PEARSON'S MONTHLY tells that It was an M old custom to always put a coin under the H mast of a ship, It ought to be gold or if ''M that could not be had silver would do, and then H relates how in Liverpool some years back a dere- H lict Yankee schooner, bought for a song, yield- ed a 1804 dollar, the rarest and nioal eagerly sought after of American coins. It was sold readily for $6,000 and would be worth today at i least double that sum, because it says, "It was "H in perfect preservation." H That is a characteristic of silver coins. When Abraham wanted a burial place for his wife M he bought a tract of land and paid for it in a $M certain number of pieces of silver. That was 11 before the days of coinage and it was the cus- ' torn to have silver of a certain width and thick- M noss, but cut different lengths, and those pieces M represented so much property. I H Now if one of those pieces could be recovered ' H it would be like that coin found under the mast M of the schooner in perfect condition, becaues M away back in the time before history began to make its records, men found out certain facts : M about gold and silver. One was that they were M indestructible; another was that they were mal- 11 leablo; another was that they had lustre which 'M neither the fire nor the damp could dim. The M only difference between the two, except in color, M Is gold has more density than sliver. fl And those old chaps also discovered that when M tho furniture In their caves burned up, the silver i M and the gold were neither of them consumed ' They noticed another thing, that they were both M hard to get, and still a farther fact, that while M their wild grain and their animal food were all - M consumed in the year in which they were pro- J duced, these two metuls remained Intact, and aM they found that men after a little were willing H lo work for them or to take either of them in H payment, and so, Insensibly, they became meas- I H ures of value so much silver or so much gold ( H could buy a sheep or an ox or anything else H that men had for sale. Hj I I |