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efore told the government that the cost would be so great that he declined to undertake it; but the possession of the plate, and the information that its capture would give, were so exceedingly important, that the detective was authorized to go on with it. He did so; the plate was obtained; all the information sought for was procured, and the counterfeiters and their abettors were captured. But it cost the government one hundred and twenty thousand dollars to accomplish this result. There were regular vouchers for every payment, and each was carefully scrutinized and verified. There was no doubt whatever that all the expenditures had been made in good faith, and with the utmost economy. Doubtless the government felt that the possession of that plate, and the knowledge gained, were worth all they had cost. TRACKING A MURDERER. The following case, which occurred a few years ago, in a sister city, will show how the detectives track and secure their game: A terrible murder had been committed. The sods were scarcely heaped upon the coffin of the murdered man when one of his murderers was securely confined in the cells of the central station. The arrest was one of unusual difficulty. When the detectives visited the scene of the murder, the only clue to the perpetrators was a blood stained handkerchief and the gag used in strangling their victim. With these faint traces there was little hope of ferreting out the murderer, but Detective Joshua Taggart assumed the task. Returning to the store, he reconnoitered the premises with new diligence. A new trace was then discovered. A new mortise chisel, wrapped in a piece of brown paper, lay on a shelf in the room. The chisel was not the property of the proprietors of the dental depot. It had plainly been brought there by the burglars. To trace it then became the task of the detective. Upon it depended his only hope of tracing the murder from the dead porter to the burglars who had killed the unoffending warden. There were none of the usual evidences of crime in the robbery of the store. A skilled detective knows every thief within his jurisdiction, and their operations are to him familiar and easily recognized. The appearance of a forced door will indicate the man who burst it open. An experienced detective will trace a burglar by the manner of opening a door as readily as a bank teller will recognize the hand writing of one of his depositors. The size of the jemmy used, the manner in which it is applied, the place at which a house is entered, whether at the door, the window, the roof, or the cellar grating, are all so many unerring indications to the detectives of the burglars whose operations he traces. But in this case there was no burglary committed. It was simply murder and robbery. The murdered man had either opened the door of the wareroom, or the murderers opened the door with the keys taken from the gagged or insensible porter. The removal of the goods betokened the robbery. Gold, silver and platina to the value of three thousand dollars were taken away, but there were no traces or evidence of the burglars. A murdered man lay dead in the entry, a number of shelves stood empty against the wall, but neither clue nor trace, footprint nor finger mark, existed to aid or direct the detective's sagacity in his search. Detective Taggart knew this. He felt the difficulty of his situation, and he preserved the chisel as the first link of the evidence he was to forge and fasten into a chain of convicting proof. He took the chisel home. The trade mark could not guide him. Hundreds of the firm's chisels were weekly sold in the city, and the clue seemed losing its power, when a few figures on the back of the wrapping paper inclosing the chisel arrested Taggart's attention. These figures were evidently a calculation by a hardware dealer of the price of the tool, the reduction by a slow hand of the business trade mark into the simple value of the digits. To find the man who had made the memorandum on the back of the paper was the first step in detecting the murderer. Mr. Taggart visited the hardware dealers one by one until he despaired of finding the one who sold the chisel. There was no evide