when a travelling post-office, with a staff of
clerks, accompanied it. But these clerks, common
objects now at any railway station, who
always look so remarkably dingy and unshaven,
as well as so remarkably busy, are no more to
be compared in gentility and exalted dignity of
deportment to our royal liveried guard, than the
shrill scream of the whistle to the sweet, clear
notes of the key-bugle.

Before 1840, two letter-carriers, of the
stamp of the villainous old Perry and his fat
comrade, distributed the letters of our town,
and its district of forty miles, very much at
their own discretion; in 1862, fifty-nine persons,
as sub-postmasters, rural messengers, and letter-
carriers, were engaged upon nearly the same
ground, in transmitting and delivering letters
free through every village and hamlet. Then,
in a room, half nursery, the light work occupied
one person for about two hours daily; now three
clerks, no longer children, are required to transact
the business of the same office. The five
hundred letters received and despatched weekly
have multiplied into fifteen thousand; with the
addition of two thousand five hundred
newspapers, and three hundred and fifty book-parcels;
while instead of five bags daily, thirty-four
are made up and despatched in all directions.
Now, almost the hour at which a letter is posted
is indicated by the date-stamp; but I have
before me the cover of an old letter, with the
usual words " Single, Speed" written upon it,
which bears no stamp whatever by which to
check the time of its delivery with the date of
its despatch. The official surveillance has grown
vigorous; formerly the surveyor sent courteous
intimation of his visits some days beforehand,
that everything might be in order; but now, he,
or any one of his numerous assistants, may enter
the office at any moment, and institute a rigid
examination of all the details of its work. This
old money-order desk, too, ink-stained as a
schoolboy's, has done its duty through all the
changes of that branch of the service by which
fifteen millions of money is now transmitted
annually through the United Kingdom. An old
yellow-leaved penny memorandum-book is the
representative of the great ledgers of to-day;
the entries in it numbering about five weekly,
and the commission charged being eightpence in
the pound, with a stamp-duty of one shilling
if the sum exceeded two pounds. Until the
money-order business ceased to be a monopoly,
and was incorporated with the Post-office in
1838, the whole cost of forwarding one pound
by money-order from this town to London, was
no less than two-and-fourpence; the enclosure
of the order in the letter involving a double
charge upon the latter, as only one sheet could
be sent for a single postage.

I must own that in all country places there is
an instinctive suspicion and doubt of the
post-office. Sir Walter Scott's type of an inquisitive
post-mistress, with her two gossips, holding
a letter up before the light, is still the prevailing
opinion about us; and, in fact, while looking
over a number of old Postal Circulars, a
paper which is sent every week to each office, I
find that in most instances of dismissal for
"tampering with letters" the offender is a
postmistress, or a female employée. Even ourselves,
when some of us resided at a distance, began to
fancy there was too great an interest in our
private affairs indulged in at the village post-office;
and we were wont to examine our seals
jealously. I knew a child, whose father was a
postmaster, say to some ladies, expressing their
anxiety to see what was in a letter to their
brother, "Oh, Miss Emma! you just warm a
knife, not too hot, and put it under a seal, and
it'll open of itself." The misgiving is not
altogether without foundation. A great deal can
be known from the outside of a letter, where
there is no disposition to pry into the enclosure.
Who would not be almost satisfied with knowing
all the correspondence coming to or leaving
the hands of the object of his interest? From
our long training among the letters of our
district, we knew the handwriting of most persons
so intimately, that no attempt at disguise,
however cunningly executed, could succeed with
us. We noticed the ominous lawyers' letters
addressed to tradesmen whose circumstances
were growing embarrassed; and we saw the
carefully ill-written direction to the street in
Liverpool and London, where some poor fugitive
debtor was in hiding. The evangelical
curate, who wrote in a disguised hand and
under an assumed name to the fascinating
public singer, did not deceive us; the young
man, who posted a circular love-letter to three
or four girls the same night, never escaped our
notice; the wary maiden, prudently keeping
two strings to her bow, unconsciously depended
upon our good faith. The public never know
how much they owe to official secresy and
official honour, and how rarely this confidence
is betrayed. Petty tricks and artifices, small
dishonesties, histories of tyranny and suffering,
exaggerations, and disappomtments, were thrust
upon our notice. As if we were the official
confidants of the neighbourhood, we were acquainted
with the leading events in the lives of most of
the inhabitants.

For the poor we were often persuaded both
to read and write their letters; and the Irish
especially, with whom penmanship was a rare
accomplishment, seldom failed to succeed in
their eloquent petitions; though no one can
realise the difficulty of writing from a Paddy's
dictation, where "the pratees, and the pig, and
the praiste, God bless him!" become involved
in one long, perplexed sentence, without any
period from beginning to end of the letter. One
such epistle, the main topic of which was an
extravagant lamentation over the death of a
wife, rose to the pathetic climax, "and now I'm
obleeged to wash meself, and bake meself!"
The letters of the English poor, on the
contrary, were composed of short, bald sentences;
except in the case of the miners in our
neighbourhood, who generally looked to us to
conduct their correspondence with their
sweethearts, during the yearly absence of the latter in