Have you ever looked at the shield on many of our 19th and 20th century coins and wondered what the lines across the top horizontal bar of our national shield represent? How about the lines on the vertical bars? Beyond the vertical bars representing the 13 original states holding up the single bar representing the federal government you may be surprised to find that the lines or the lack thereof on the bars are defined by certain colors in heraldry called tinctures.

With all my recent coin purchases, I had racked up quite a few E-Bay Bucks. Thus, I was able to upgrade two coins in my 7070 type set based solely on E-Bay Bucks. With the remaining balance I bought a Conder Token for my seated-imagery custom set at a 32% discount.