Capitol dome and banknotes on a forearm

Forgive the smudge. The ink in the counting room has gone thick with damp, and I have been at the tallies since seven. Mr Corless from the Ohio concern came in on Tuesday with a case of hundred-dollar notes and wanted them changed into sovereigns before his train. Four thousand, all crisp, every bill with the old gentleman staring out at me as though he suspected I might try to keep one.

I counted them twice, as Mr Hobday taught me, and once more because the stack had a little lean to it, like a tower put up by a man in a hurry. The lowest bill had a great black hundred stamped in the corner. It put me in mind of a postcard Corless showed me, a white dome on a hill in a city I will never see. He said the men who raised it had worked from a notion rather than from any drawing sent up from London, and that the gilt on top had been put there so the dome would catch the sun for miles.

When the case was gone I went out to the yard to smoke and looked up at the chimney of the pit, the only dome this village has ever had, black where it should be white. I thought of the sums I have added up for thirty years and how not one of them ever belonged to me.

I am keeping the one bill he left folded inside the ledger by mistake. Do not tell Mother. I shall spend it on the fare to see you at Michaelmas, and then we will see whose dome stands taller.

Your loving brother, Harold