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Show Federal Assay Office Employs No Salesmen Our government's head gold buyer is the federal assay office, on the lower end of Manhattan Island, New York. It takes the crude wealth of gold mines and the gold that other lands send us, assays, refines It, and pays the sender its value In dollars; also by check drawn on the federal treasury. This office does a "cash and carry trade" and seeks no customers. Those who would buy or sell gold must come to it. Bars, nuggets, dust and amalgam, old jewelry, or coins from abroad find a market at all federal assay offices and mints. "Some odd and interesting treasures treas-ures have been packed up and tossed into our melting-pots," said the superintendent super-intendent of the New York office. "From a complete dinner set of gold, Including every dish used at a formal dhiner, we got 52S.000 worth of gold. "But all is not gold that glitters, even here. To our testing laboratory came one day two bright yellow bricks for which a Harlem doctor paid $23,000. When our assay showed they contained not one ounce of gold, the doctor collapsed." Frederick Simpich in the National Geographic Magazine. |