Neither of these coins are ones I "need" for my collection but I thought they were too nice to pass up. It's becoming increasingly difficult to find nice, original, unmolested, circulated 3CS coins. Very hard. This one screamed take me home! It has plenty of luster ("life") to it. The grader sold it as AU50, although I would be a bit more optimistic and call it AU55.

The second one is a totally different story. The 1865 has awesome luster, a superb strike (almost proof-like strike as far as the devices go; very high relief with everything struck up), great clashing, and just a great look. I bought it as an MS60 because the reverse has some hairlining due to a cleaning. It was mild enough that this is the very rare time I would deliberately buy a cleaned coin. This coin is beautiful in hand and without the hairlining would grade 63/64 easily. It's tough to get the hairlines to show in the picture. Obviously the cleaning wasn't too harsh, otherwise, I would have passed on the coin. There's a small planchet flaw between the first and second "I" on the reverse that is fairly exaggerated in the photo along with a piece of lint that was on top of the holder in the same spot.

Nice stuff!

Both quite nice! I especially like the 3CN - check out that prominent clashing on the reverse (and on the obverse). Pretty typical I guess, but still impresses me.

The silver 3 cent (Trime or whatever) is one of my fav coins. There is just something about that tiny little silver coin, with that great star, unusual bejeweled "C" and the overall appearance of most specimens. I love that they were made so small, too bad the liberty head 3 cent wasn't silver and as small! Beautiful coins Prethen, you surely have an eye for that sort of thing.

I really like the 1860. I would like one of those. Nice Coin!

Very nice.

I miss these kind of posts. I don't always find them when they are religated to the "Recent purchase" threads.

wow, those are lovely