The Million Pound Bank-Note

Henry Adams was twenty-seven, a clerk for a mining broker in San Francisco, and a keen sailor, which is how he came to be in London without a penny. One Saturday he had taken a little boat out into the bay, been carried out to sea by the wind, and been picked up by a ship bound for London, where he worked his passage and was put ashore in rags. For a day he wandered the streets, so hungry that when he saw a child throw a half-eaten pear into the gutter, he very nearly picked it up.

What he did not know was that he was being watched from a window by two elderly brothers, who had spent the morning arguing about a curious question. The Bank of England, as it happened, had issued two notes of a million pounds each, and the brothers held one of them. Suppose, said one brother, that an honest, intelligent stranger without a friend in the world were given such a note but no means of proving it was his: what would become of him? He would starve, said the first; nobody could change it, and he would be arrested if he tried. Not at all, said the other; he would live on it for thirty days and stay out of prison. They bet twenty thousand pounds on it, and Henry, wandering below, was precisely the man they needed.

They called him in, handed him an envelope, told him he would find an explanation inside, and sent him away before he could ask a single question. Assuming it contained a little charity, he hurried to the nearest eating house and ordered everything he could afford, and a good deal he could not. Only when the bill came did he open the envelope. The waiter, who had been eyeing his rags with open contempt, glanced at the note, turned white and backed away, assuring him that he could pay whenever it was convenient.

So it went everywhere. In a tailor's shop, a clerk who had sneered at him while handing over the worst suit in the place nearly fainted at the sight of the note. The owner himself, bowing low, insisted on measuring Henry for a dozen suits on credit. Within a week, the newspapers were calling him "the vest-pocket millionaire." Nobody could change the note, and so nobody ever asked him to pay. He lived on credit alone, terrified every night that the whole thing would collapse, and he fell in love, at a dinner party, with a young woman called Portia, to whom, to his own surprise, he told the entire story. She laughed until she cried.

At the end of the month, Henry presented himself to the brothers, the note unspent, and, as it happened, two hundred thousand pounds richer, having lent his famous name to a friend's mining deal. The brother who had won the bet was so delighted that he offered Henry any position he liked. Henry chose the position of son-in-law. Portia, it turned out, was the winning brother's stepdaughter.

On their wedding day her stepfather made them a present of the note, which hangs, framed, in their home to this day. Henry likes to point out to visitors that it is a very remarkable note: in all its life it made only a single purchase, and even then it got the article for about a tenth of what she was worth.