I AM often asked whether this or that piece of mutilated money is redeemable. It is safe to say, unless the money's identity is entirely gone, that it is redeemable. In fact, one may say that money in the shape of ashes can be restored. It is a fact that after the Chicago fire ashes were redeemed. It came about in this way: It is customary in banks to do money up in packages, say of $10,000 each, and in the big fire of course hundreds and hundreds of these packages were reduced to ashes. But the shape of the packages remained, and wherever the package could be sent on to Washington without crumbling to ashes, the money was sure to be replaced. It was done by nimble-fingered women in the Treasury Department, whose trained touch and sight are wonderfully acute. It is well known that the ashes of a newspaper, if dampened, will show traces of the printing. So it was with the bills. These women would moisten the package of apparently useless ashes, and to their experienced eye the number and character of the bill would at once appear as if they had touched it with a magic wand. So thousands and thousands of dollars were redeemed by these patient women. A friend of mine, a country merchant, afraid of banks, placed a large sum of money in bills in a stone jar on a shelf in his store, where he thought it would be quite safe. When he went to look at it one day some time after, it was a mass of fragments. Mice had got into the jar and chewed the bills into the minutest parts. Then they had mixed them all up, and together it was a fearful-looking mess. He sent a cigar box full of it. I forwarded it to Washington, and what do you think? Out of the $1,145 originally in the pile, a little over $1,000 was redeemed, the parts beyond recall being only the merest fibers of the bills. So the man lost only $100 by his foolishness. The reclamation of such money is done entirely by women, whose patience especially fits them for the monotonous work.—St. Louis Globe-Democrat.