XXX] BOSTON TO WASHINGTON 123 



she could get many advanced thinkers to join ; and some years 

 after she wrote to me about it. But my work was at home. 



Many of my most interesting and most intellectual friends 

 were spiritualists. Besides Professor Coues, a man of the 

 mental calibre of Huxley with the charming personality of 

 Mivart, I saw most of General Francis Lippitt, a man who 

 was a lawyer as well as a soldier, and had held many high 

 offices under the Government. He was highly educated and 

 had seen much of the world, and we spent many pleasant 

 hours together. He introduced me to Mr. Daniel Lyman, 

 solicitor to the Treasury, a man of powerful physique and 

 strong character, who had for many years made a study of 

 spiritualistic phenomena, and, like Sir W. Crookes, had had 

 mediums to live with him and be wholly subject to his own 

 conditions. Under such circumstances he had obtained 

 phenomena of a more astounding, yet more convincing nature 

 than any person I have met. He took us over the Treasury, 

 showed us the beautiful machinery for engraving bank-notes, 

 so that every fresh issue — and they are continually being 

 made — may have a new and highly complex pattern. We 

 were also taken to the Treasury vaults — some filled to the roof 

 with bags of dollars, others with gold in interminable ranges. 

 One huge vault, about sixty feet by thirty feet, with iron 

 partitions, was filled from floor to ceiling with bags of dollars, 

 one thousand in each bag. The total amount was fifty-seven 

 millions, and in another vault there was twenty-five millions 

 in gold. The large double doors closing these vaults are 

 of steel, strengthened by massive cross-bars and with huge 

 cylindrical bolts at top, bottom, and sides, all connected by a 

 clockwork arrangement, which prevents the bolts from being 

 moved till the hour at which the clock was previously set. 

 The doors and locks are highly finished pieces of engineer- 

 ing, and must have cost a very large sum each. These enor- 

 mous stores of coin, and the complex and costly arrangements 

 for keeping them safely, afford a striking object-lesson to the 

 socialist of the waste and absurdity of our existing systems 

 of currency, which would be completely unnecessary under a 

 more rational social organization. 



