Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

IN CIVIL WAR TIME

39

up in front of Admiral Farragut in full uniform, and he,
hero always, though looking a trifle bored, shook hands
with us on the stage and as the chosen representative
of the North Pole dismissed us along our respective
meridians.
The pleasantest day of the week, of course, was schoolless Saturday. I was often sent down-town then to buy
the family's supply of postage-stamps at the post-office
in the old Middle Dutch Church and British military
prison, where the Mutual Life Building is; also to get the
weekly illustrated papers and monthly magazines at a
shop on the Vesey Street side of the Astor House. The
ride down-town from Forty-second Street either by omnibus or horse-car consumed about an hour, with the advantage for speed slightly in favor of the rails. Transportation cost me three cents each way, payment usually
being made with a postage-stamp of that denomination
framed behind isinglass in a little dish of tin, or else with
the so-called army and navy cents or some of the proprietary and advertising tokens issued by private enterprise to supplement the war scarcity of government silver
and copper. There were hundreds and hundreds of varieties of this pseudo-coin in circulation, passing current for
small change. My father, thorough-going collector of
these tokens, as well as of the thousands of different
propaganda envelopes, both Union and Confederate,
patriotic, defiant, colored, embossed, and humorous,
sometimes took me along with him even to the remoteness
of the letter avenues on the East Side in his pursuit of
a new specimen. We would climb flight after flight of
dingy staircase in some tenement-house before we reached
the stamping-machine where illegal-looking persons were
swinging the heavy iron bars, weighted with cannon-ball
ends, that unofficially minted the tokens. It was like
going into a counterfeiters' den.

The Fifth Avenue omnibuses of the old type running