A Cent with Two Faces: The Day Wilkins Stamped the Wrong Coin
A Civil War era New Hampshire moonshiner hammers his name onto a worn copper cent, and it turns out to be a rare 1799 large cent. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells how that one blow made him 'Two-Faced Wilkins' around Pittsfield, and how the same copper ended up in both the Treasury's purse and the moonshine still pot. Revenue man Captain Donald Vance brings a forged Wilkins counterstamp and tales of coins, scales and copper stills, and the episode ends with distilling advice on thump keg wood and the shake-test bead myth.
In this episode
- How a counterstamp ruined a rare 1799 large cent and made 'Two-Faced Wilkins' the talk of Pittsfield, NH
- American coin history: large cents, Flying Eagle, Indian Head and bronze cents, and the Coinage Act of 1857
- Spanish silver, ninepence and fourpence-ha'penny, and Bungtown counterfeit coppers in old New England
- Copper for coins and stills: Boulton's Birmingham blanks, Paul Revere's Canton mill and Lake Superior Keweenaw copper
- Early coin collectors and the Boston Numismatic Society in the Civil War era
- Revenue service stories from Captain Donald Vance: a forged counterstamp, tavern tills, scales, stills and a badge-biting old woman
- Thump keg flavoring: hickory, ash and red oak shavings for moonshine
- Debunking the moonshine shake-test bead myth for proof
Dr. Wilkins confesses the worst blunder of his anvil years: he hammered 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.' onto a worn cent that turned out to be a rare 1799 large cent, and the county called him 'Two-Faced Wilkins' for years after. Captain Donald Vance of Manchester brings a forged Wilkins counterstamp he took out of a Woodsville tavern till, and tells other new stories of coins, scales, and stills from the revenue service, including one about an old woman who bit his badge. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro about hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and debunks the shake-test bead myth.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Settle your hairy carcass down, you four-hundred-pound sack of grievances. That is a crow, not a sheriff, and you cannot eat it through a wall. Lie down or I will pull your molars and string them for a necklace for the Widow Tasker.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, a long sulking groan
Wilkins: There. He is sulking. A bear sulks the same as a selectman: loud, long, and in the way of honest business.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, sinners, saints, and the fence-sitters who are a little of both. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, and by the testimony of two sheriffs, a nuisance to the peace of the county. Tonight I am confessing a sin. Not the whiskey, the county already knows about that. No, tonight is the worst blunder of my anvil years. The day I struck my name on the wrong damned coin.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: You hear that ring? Every one of those strikes cost me a little reputation, and one of them cost me the whole pile. Before we get to it, my pitchman has a word. Keep it short, Announcer, Barnaby is hungry and you are plump.
♪ Brief tinny calliope flourish
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! Learn the craft from the Alchemist himself in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course: cuts, copper, fire, and history, eight full weeks! Get the particulars at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Calliope flourish ends
Wilkins: He talks like a man selling snake oil because he used to sell snake oil. Actual snake, too. I have seen the jar.
♪ Fiddle drops to a low, slow drone
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The copper in your pocket and where in hell it came from.
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: To understand my disgrace you have to understand the pocket change of this Republic. For sixty-odd years, from 1793 forward, the American cent was a big fat copper the size of a Sunday biscuit. The large cent. From 1796 it weighed a hundred and sixty-eight grains, and any storekeeper worth his flour barrel kept a little brass balance on the counter to prove it. Then in February of 1857 Congress lost its nerve and killed the big cent dead, and the half cent with it. In its place came a skinny little cent of eighty-eight parts copper and twelve parts nickel, with an eagle flying across it like it was running from the tax man. That was the Flying Eagle cent. Then in '59 we got the Indian Head. And just last year, in '64, they turned it to bronze, thinner still: ninety-five parts copper, the rest tin and zinc. The same year they gave us a two-cent piece, I suppose because one cent was not enough to buy anything anymore.
Wilkins: The same Act of 1857 did something folks in the Suncook Valley still curse. It stripped the Spanish silver of its standing as lawful money. You older folks remember the reckoning. In New England a Spanish real was a 'ninepence' and a half real was a 'fourpence-ha'penny,' or just 'fourpence.' Go to New York and the same coins were a shilling and a sixpence, because a New Yorker cannot even agree with himself about money, let alone with a Yankee. The fourpence-ha'penny is the only coin in New England with a name longer than its worth.
Wilkins: And mixed in with all of it were the bungtowns. Bungtown coppers. Lightweight counterfeit British halfpence with old King George's fat face on them, passed off as cents by every crook from Portsmouth to Providence. The name comes from Bungtown, the old name for part of Rehoboth down in Massachusetts, a place I have never visited and will never forgive.
Wilkins: Now, you moonshiners, you ask what this has to do with you. Copper, children. The same copper. Where did a Yankee get sheet copper for a cent or for a still pot? For years the Mint bought its cent blanks from across the ocean, from Mr. Matthew Boulton's works in Birmingham, England. Then Paul Revere, yes, the midnight-ride Revere, opened a copper rolling mill at Canton, Massachusetts in 1801, and Yankee sheet copper went to shipyards, coppersmiths, and a good many still-houses that never sent Mr. Revere a thank-you note. Today the great American copper comes from the Lake Superior country up in Michigan, the Keweenaw mines, shipped down the lakes through the Sault canal they opened in '55, then east by rail and wagon. The same red metal goes into the Treasury's purse and into a Merrimack County still pot, and I have never met a coppersmith who could swear which way any one sheet was headed.
Wilkins: And when they killed the big cent, every banker, parson, and schoolmaster with a cigar box suddenly turned collector. The old dates were vanishing, so everybody wanted them. The American Numismatic Society started up in New York in '58, and the Boston Numismatic Society in 1860. Numismatist. That is Greek for a man who will pay forty dollars for a cent and then haggle over the price of his own mother's funeral. Remember these gentlemen, because one of them ruined my life.
♪ Banjo picks up a nervous, comic shuffle
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Two-Faced Wilkins.
♦ Wax crackle, Barnaby snorts outside
Wilkins: The spring of '63. Deacon Ebenezer Cate came in holding his jaw like he was carrying a hornet's nest in his mouth. Lower left molar, black as a stove lid, stinking like a dead woodchuck in August. I sat him in the chair, strapped him down, gave him the forceps, and that tooth came out with a sound like a boot pulled out of spring mud. Three roots, all hooked, one of them holding a piece of the Deacon's jaw that he was not using anyhow. He bled on my apron, he bled on my floor, he bled on my cat, and when he could talk again he paid me. Part of it was in coppers, and one was so worn I could not read a date on it. Liberty's face was worn as smooth as a river stone and the reverse was barely there. The Deacon paid for his molar with that cent, which makes it the only time a deacon gave more than he meant to, and the only time I took less than I was owed.
Wilkins: So I did what I always did with a worn-out copper. I set it on the anvil, took my punch, and struck it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: 'G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.' Square across the reverse, right where it once said ONE CENT. So now the thing read, if you squinted: ONE... G. G. WILKINS. Liberty on one side, me on the other. I spent it at the store on Main Street for a plug of tobacco and forgot it entirely.
Wilkins: Eight months later a letter appears in the Concord paper. A Mr. Hosea Philbrick, a gentleman of the Boston Numismatic Society with a summer house up past the lake, had found that cent in a Pittsfield store's change drawer. He put it under his glass, and under the worn-off date he found a nine punched over an eight. Seventeen ninety-nine. The rarest cent this Republic ever made, the coin those gentlemen dream of at night. And I had hammered my own name across its backside like a farmer branding a heifer.
Wilkins: I have the letter by heart. 'A tooth-drawing vandal of Pittsfield has defaced the most coveted copper of the American series with his vulgar mark.' Vulgar! That stamp is the finest lettering in Merrimack County. That Boston collector looked at my stamp through his glass the way a minister looks at a dance hall: with horror and a little too much interest.
Wilkins: You must understand, a counterstamp on a common worn cent makes it a curiosity. Collectors like them, a little bit of local color. But a counterstamp on a rare date is murder. It is like carving your initials into the Bible at the Old North Church. It took that coin from a cabinet prize to a damaged freak.
Wilkins: And the county never let it go. Schoolboys followed me down the turnpike chanting 'Two-Faced Wilkins, Two-Faced Wilkins, stamp your name on Grandma's quilt-ins.' Terrible poetry, but they meant it. I have been called a quack, a drunk, and a Democrat, but 'Two-Faced Wilkins' is the only one that ever stuck, and I earned it with a four-pound hammer. That coin had two faces: Lady Liberty on one side and me on the other, and in the whole county nobody could agree which of us looked more ashamed.
Wilkins: It gets worse. Philbrick sent an agent up from Boston to see if I had any more rare coppers I had 'vandalized.' A tall, pinched fellow in a beaver hat, smelling of bay rum and contempt. He came round the back of the still-house without knocking, which is the one thing you must never do at Fort Wilkins, because that is where Barnaby's chain reaches.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinking hard
Wilkins: Barnaby rose up on his hind legs, seven feet of black fur and bad breath, and swatted that beaver hat clean off the man's head. A fair patch of scalp came with it. It sounded like a wet bedsheet tearing on a clothesline. The agent ran for the turnpike with a flap of hair bouncing on his crown like a loose shingle, bleeding down his collar and screaming in what I believe was Latin. Barnaby sat down and ate the hat. Beaver, silk lining, the maker's label, the lot. The hat was the first honest thing Boston ever gave Pittsfield.
Wilkins: And then, so help me, there is a final dishonor. When the agent was gone I noticed my coin pouch was missing from the stump by the door. Barnaby had eaten that too. Seven stamped cents and a fourpence. I waited three days for Barnaby to pass that pouch, and I panned his leavings like a California forty-niner working the most disgraceful placer diggings in New England. Got back six cents and the fourpence, polished brighter than the Mint ever made them. The seventh is still inside him somewhere, and he is welcome to it.
Wilkins: And Philbrick? He kept the 1799. It sits in his cabinet in Boston on a velvet tray, labeled, I am told, 'Defaced by a Pittsfield tooth-drawer.' So I am in a museum after all. Just not the way I hoped.
♪ Fiddle sting
Wilkins: Now, tonight I have a guest who knows more about coins in a still-house till than any man living. He is a retired officer of the federal revenue service, out of Manchester, who has chased copper up and down the White Mountains and the Green, and he respects a clean pot as much as he hates a poisonous one. Captain Donald Vance. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Captain. Mind the bear.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I minded him. He looked at me like I was a ham hung up to cure.
Wilkins: He looks at the Methodist minister the same way, and the minister has more meat on him. Captain, I hear you came here with a gift.
Captain: I did. Hold out your hand, Doctor. This cent came out of the till of a tavern in Woodsville, up on the Connecticut, after we broke up a still in the hayloft above the taproom. Look at the stamp.
♦ Coin set down on a wooden table, a slow wax crackle
Wilkins: That is my mark. G. G. WILKINS. And... hold on. P-I-T-T-S-F-E-I-L-D. Pittsfeild. Some son of a bitch has forged my counterstamp and cannot even spell my town.
Captain: The tavern keeper swore you stamped it yourself, in person, while drunk.
Wilkins: I have stamped coins drunk, Captain. I have stamped coins drunk, in the dark, during a thunderstorm, with a bear licking my ear. I have never once misspelled Pittsfield. Whoever forged my stamp could not even spell Pittsfield, which tells me he was either from Concord or sober.
Captain: He was a teamster, and he was neither. He had cut the punch from an old file. We found it in his boot.
Wilkins: A man who would counterfeit a counterfeiter's mark has no honor at all, and I want his name so I can offer him a job. Now tell me something. In your service, did coins ever really help you catch a distiller?
Captain: More often than you would credit. In Sanbornton I lifted the floor of a still-house and found a stoneware crock full to the brim with cents. Not one was clean. Every one had some storekeeper's mark on it: a dry-goods man in Laconia, a harness maker in Bristol, a grocer over in Plymouth, a dozen of them. That fellow had been trading jugs for coppers all over three counties, and every coin carried the name of the man who paid him. I laid them out on the kitchen table like a map. The coins told me where the whiskey went before he did.
Wilkins: God almighty. So every storekeeper who advertised on a cent was also writing his own confession.
Captain: In a manner of speaking. I did not arrest the storekeepers. I just made a point of buying my tobacco from each of them and looking at them over the counter a long while.
Wilkins: That is cruel, Captain. I admire it. What about the old Spanish silver? The ninepences and fourpences?
Captain: There was a distiller in Canaan, a stubborn, hard-shell old fellow, who paid his assessment in a sack of Spanish fourpence pieces worn so thin you could read a newspaper through them. He swore up and down they were worth a sixpence apiece, as his father had taken them. I told him the law had not called them money since '57. He said the law could go to the devil, and the coins would go with me. So we walked to the druggist's and put the whole sack on the balance against the weight of good silver. He came up nearly a third short.
Wilkins: And what did he do?
Captain: He paid the balance owed in maple sugar. Forty pounds of it. I gave it to the orphan asylum and wrote in my report 'settled in kind.'
Wilkins: A Yankee will test a coin with his teeth, his scale, and his scripture, and he will trust the teeth.
Captain: You are closer to the truth than you know, Doctor. There was a widow up in Danbury, eighty if she was a day, who would not believe my badge was real. Thought I was a tin peddler having fun with her. So she took it out of my hand and bit it, the way her mother taught her to bite a gold piece.
Wilkins: And?
Captain: And her last front tooth came out and stayed stuck in the badge. Stood straight up out of the eagle like a fence post. She looked at it, looked at me, and said, 'Well, it is harder than I am, so it must be government.'
Wilkins: Captain, she bit your badge and left her last tooth in it. In my trade we call that a successful extraction with an unusual fee. Did she owe the tax?
Captain: She did not. Her still was a tea kettle and a gun barrel, which is dangerous, so I took it. But I bought her a jar of honey and a soft loaf of bread, since she had nothing left to chew with.
Wilkins: You are a soft touch, Captain. Under that stern face there is a grandmother. One more. Have you ever seen a bungtown copper in a courtroom?
Captain: Once, in Grafton County. A man tried to pay his fine with a handful of them, King George's face all over them. The magistrate held one up to the window and told him, very stern, that this was no lawful money of the United States and he would not take it. Then he sent the man away to fetch real money. When the courtroom emptied, I saw the old judge slip one into his waistcoat pocket. He told me afterward it was 'for his cabinet.'
Wilkins: The magistrate refused those bungtowns as legal money and then pocketed one for his cabinet, which is how most judges in Grafton County treat the law. Captain, you have been a credit to the service, which I have never said about any revenue man, and I will deny it tomorrow.
Captain: I would expect nothing else, Doctor. And I will keep your forged cent if you like, as evidence.
Wilkins: The hell you will. That is the only coin in New England worse spelled than my reputation. I am nailing it over the door. Captain Donald Vance, ladies and gentlemen.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Or he wants the Captain's boots. Hard to tell.
♪ Calliope and banjo burst into a lively pitch tune
Announcer: AD BREAK! Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and listen close! Have you ever stood over a pot, watched the first drops fall, and wondered: is this the poison or the prize? Wonder no more! Ready to master the thermodynamics of vapor, the art of cuts, and the deep history of American spirits? Then enroll now in the ALCHEMIST G. G. WILKINS MASTER DISTILLING COURSE, presented by the Fort Wilkins Academy! Eight full weeks of the most comprehensive historical and technical distilling instruction ever put together! Learn directly from master distillers, coppersmiths, and historians, with more than THIRTY HOURS of detailed modules, true blueprints, and live question-and-answer sessions! Learn why the old masters swore by heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, and why no honest still ever touched lead solder! Learn which cuts to throw out, which to keep, and why! All for the sum of one hundred ninety-nine dollars, and every dollar of it pays you back in knowledge! See the copper with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire! Reserve your seat at fortwilkins.com/course! Once more, friends: fortwilkins.com/course! And you will find all the particulars at moonshinestill.com/course. Enroll today, before the bear eats the last seat!
♪ Pitch tune ends with a cymbal crash
Wilkins: He means that. Barnaby ate a pew cushion once.
♪ Low fiddle, warm and steady
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft. And a warning about pocket change.
♦ Wax crackle, the soft hiss of a low fire
Wilkins: First the law, so the deputies have nothing to whine about. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What I am telling you tonight is history and education. Now, children, the craft.
Wilkins: A man who has had a great scare over a cent starts to think hard about metal. So hear me now. There are fools in these hills who melt coins to patch a still. Do not. The new bronze cent carries tin and zinc. The nickel cent carries nickel. And Lord knows what a melted handful of bungtowns carries; there was lead in many a cheap counterfeit. Coins are money, not still metal, and defacing them for metal will put you before a magistrate besides. If you melt pennies to make a still you are turning Mr. Lincoln's small change into your own large funeral. A still is built of clean sheet copper, heavy and pure, joined with silver solder or tight mechanical joints, never lead.
Wilkins: Now the mash. Corn is starch, and yeast cannot eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a grindstone. So you crack the corn and cook it in water until it turns to a thick, sweet-smelling porridge. Then you let it cool until it is hot enough to sting a finger but not scald it. That is when you stir in your malted barley, or malted rye, because the malt carries the virtue that turns the starch into sugar. Let it rest, covered, an hour or more, and taste it. When it goes from flour-paste to sweet, the conversion is done. Then cool it further, to about the warmth of new milk, before you pitch your yeast. Too hot and you cook the yeast like an oyster. Keep your fermenter in a warm room that has air moving through it, and let it work several days until it stops talking and the cap falls.
Wilkins: Then you strain off the wash, a thin sour beer of a few parts alcohol, and charge your pot. Fire low and steady. A pot that boils hard spits mash up into the head and fouls the run, and worse, a leaking joint near open flame will turn your still-house into a Fourth of July bonfire with you as the guest of honor. Never leave a running still. Never.
Wilkins: The cuts, which are the whole religion. First off the worm come the foreshots. From a small pot of five gallons of wash, throw away the first runnings, the better part of a cup at the least. They carry the methanol, the wood spirit, that blinds and kills. They go on the ground, never in a jar, never down a throat. Next the heads: sharp, solvent-smelling, like the glue pot in a cabinet shop. Those get thrown out too. Then, when the smell sweetens and rounds out like warm grain, come the hearts. That is your spirit. And as the run goes on it turns oily, cardboard-tasting, wet-dog. Those are the tails, set aside for the next run or thrown out. Catch the whole run in many small jars, line them up in order, and judge them by nose, carefully, before you blend a single drop. Never judge by guessing, and never be greedy about the heads.
Wilkins: And why copper? Your mash, especially a sour, yeasty one, gives off sulfur stink: rotten egg, boiled cabbage, a struck match. Copper takes that sulfur on itself and holds it. Iron and tin will not. That is why the inside of an old pot turns black and green. So the pot must be scrubbed bright after every run. The bright metal is what does the work, and that crust must never flake into the jar.
Wilkins: You see the kinship now. A cent and a still are both copper, and both keep a record. A cent wears down with every hand it passes through, and a still pot wears with every run. Both show you exactly how they have been treated. Mine showed I was careless. Do not let your pot say the same about you.
♪ Banjo turns quick and mischievous
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang, and the call-in tape. Ruby, roll the cylinder.
♦ A tape-cylinder whir, a click, a hissing playback with faint crackle
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Playback click off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina! A Tar Heel listening to a Yankee, which makes this the best peace treaty since Appomattox. Rabbit, God bless your uncle, but let us take his medicine apart on the anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. Every New England farm boy knows what ash is good for, because he spent his youth leaching it. You pour water through hardwood ash in a hopper and what drips out the bottom is lye. Potash. Caustic. Our grandfathers boiled it down and shipped it to England by the barrel, and our grandmothers made soap with it. Your Carolina folks use that same lye to hull corn for hominy. Lye is a fine thing for soap and hominy and a damned poor thing for your thump keg. Throw ash into hot liquid in a doubler and you are liable to get a foam that pukes up into your line and chokes it, and a choked line on a hot still is how men lose eyebrows, barns, and wives.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And here is the gospel, Rabbit: the wood spirit, the methanol, boils off in the first of the run. Ash does not catch it. Shavings do not catch it. Prayer does not catch it. The only thing that catches it is a man with the nerve to pour his foreshots and heads on the ground. Ash in the doubler is like a lawyer at a hanging: it makes a great deal of fuss and saves nobody.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here your uncle is half right, by accident, the way a blind hog finds an acorn. Oak shavings in the keg give the spirit some color, some tannin, and a woody taste, much like a barrel does over a long sleep. That is flavoring, Rabbit, not cleaning. Red oak is also porous as a sponge; the coopers will not make a whiskey barrel of it because it leaks. So your uncle's shavings make liquor taste like a church pew, and that is the closest some of his customers will ever get to a church.
Wilkins: While I am busting myths: the bead. Every jug-shaker from here to Tennessee shakes the bottle and watches the bubbles and declares it fine. The bead tells you roughly how strong the spirit is, nothing more. Bubbles hang longest at about half alcohol, and they do not care one particle whether there is methanol in it. A deadly batch can bead as pretty as a deacon's daughter's necklace. The bead test will tell you how strong the whiskey is about as well as a sheriff's smile will tell you how strong his case is.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, that one is for you. I just stamped a fresh worn cent, and I checked the date with my glass first this time, I swear before God and Barnaby. It is going in the post to you with a note: 'Cut honest, Rabbit.' Give your uncle my regards and tell him to use his ashes for soap. He sounds like a man who needs some.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinks
♪ Theme returns softly beneath
Wilkins: Before I go, my pitchman again. Short, I said.
Announcer: ONE MORE QUICK WORD! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course: eight weeks, thirty-plus hours, the cuts and the copper done right! Find it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: That is the course I would have taken myself, before I took a hammer to the rarest cent in the Republic. Learn from my blunders, children; I have plenty, and they are cheaper than yours. Sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course, and look at what is on your anvil before you swing.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, the most decent man ever to carry a revenue badge, even with a widow's tooth stuck in it. To Rabbit Miller in Wilkesboro. To Deacon Cate, wherever his jawbone may be. And to Mr. Hosea Philbrick of Boston: may your cabinet be dusty, your glass be cloudy, and your beaver hats come back safe from the woods.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle deepens
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Banjo and fiddle theme fades into wax cylinder hiss