"Over the Garden Wall": Whimsical love token engraving on 1876 Seated Liberty dime

"Over the Garden Wall": Whimsical love token engraving on 1876 Seated Liberty dime



Larger obverse picture
Larger reverse picture

Host coin: 1876 USA Seated Liberty dime.
Obverse: original Seated Liberty design, unaltered except for some wear-related scratches.
Reverse: "OVER THE GARDEN WALL / " R (G?) E. C.", (fox? cat?) leaping over stone wall in pursuit of another animal whose tail can be seen, dog chasing bird below.

Ex- "acsb-rich", eBay, 11/25/2015.

This is a great pictorial love token, though I don't know what the "Over the Garden Wall" reference is about. The engraver, despite a folksy style, had some obvious skill. At first I thought he or she had blundered the initials, but looking more closely, it seems they're deliberately done in a "furry" font, perhaps in some further reference to animals. The seller described this vignette as a cat chasing a mouse over the wall. Cat that may be, but it also might be a fox, and the creature it is chasing (whose tail can be seen on the opposite side of the wall) certainly isn't a mouse.

Though I already had duplicate Seated dime love tokens in my type set, I couldn't resist adding this one, too. (For what it's worth, we had three dogs, eight cats, and two guinea pigs at the time I bought this, so we do like our critters, and my wife and daughter, who are normally not much impressed by coins, did appreciate this piece.)

This was formerly part of my Engraved/Counterstamped/Oddball Type Set.