CHAPTER XVIII.
JIM DOANE'S BANK BOOK During the month of June that summer there was a very ambiguous affair at our old place.
Nowadays, if you lose your savings-bank book all you have to do is to notify the bank to stop payment on it.

In many other ways, too, depositors are now safeguarded from loss.

Forty years ago, however, when savings banks were newer and more autocratic, it was different.

The bank book was then something tremendously important, or at least depositors thought so.
When the savings bank at the village, six miles from the old home farm in Maine, first opened for business, Mr.Burns, the treasurer, gave each new depositor a sharp lecture.

He was a large man with a heavy black beard; as he handed the new bank book to the depositor, he would say in a dictatorial tone: "Now here is your _bank book_." What emphasis he put on those words! "It shows you what you have at the bank.