settling down to the subject. "What is ten years to it? According to the
mint reports a coin of the precious metals loses by wear and tear but
one twenty-four hundredth of its bulk in a year. These pieces I hold in
my hand, coined forty years ago, are scarcely defaced. In another forty
they will be hardly more so. What, for instance, has been the career of
this Mexican dollar? Perhaps it was struck from bullion fresh from a
Mexican mine. In that case I have nothing to say. But just as likely it
was struck from old Spanish plate or from former coin, and then it takes
us back to the earliest times, and its origin is lost in obscurity. The
same metal is time after time re-melted, re-cast, re-stamped, and thus
maintained in perpetual youth. This gold piece upon my watch-chain was
perchance coined from the sands of the Pactolus, and once bore
Chaldaean characters. And to what uses has it come?

'Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away;'

and so the pieces paid for the ransom of the Inca of Peru or Richard the
Lion-hearted, the material of the spurs of Agincourt, the rings of
Cleopatra and Zenobia, the golden targets of Solomon, fashioned from the
treasures of Ophir, may purchase soap and candles and mutton-chops for
John Smith. And yet why not? We ourselves have come down to commonplace
usages; why should not the works of our hands? You with your
conventional hat and English walking-coat, I with my spectacles and
Irish brogue, have had ancestors that wore coats of mail in the first
crusade, or twanged cross-bows with Robin Hood, sailed in the ships of
Tarshish, and traded to Tyre and Sidon."

"You think, then," said Barwood, "that some part of the coinage of
antiquity is still in circulation."