AT THE MINT
I don't know just why it was, but all the time I was in the Mint yesterday I kept on thinking about Lenine and Trotsky and how much they would have liked to be there.
I found my friend, the assistant assayer, in his laboratory making mysterious chalk marks on a long blackboard and gazing with keen gray eyes at a circle of little bottles containing pale bluish fluids. At the bottom of each vessel was a white sediment that looked like a mixture of cream cheese and headache powder. "Silver," said the assistant assayer, in an offhand way, and I was duly impressed.
You may expect to be impressed when you visit the Mint on Spring Garden street. Most of us know, in a vague way, that two-thirds of our coinage comes from that dignified building, which is probably the finest mint building in the world. Fewer of us know that most of South America's coins come from there too, and when the citizens of Lima or Buenos Aires pay out their bright centavos for a movie show or a black cigar their pockets jingle with small change stamped in Philadelphia. And none of us can realize, without a trip to that marvelous home of wonders, the spirit of devoted and delicate science that moves among the men who have spent self-effacing lives in test-
