the strawberry gardens round London. It was
no unusual circumstance for them to offer large
premiums, as much as sixpence a verse, if we
would put in " a bit of poetry," which pleased
them equally well whether it was taken, with
some slight alteration, from Wesley's Hymns
or Shenstone's Poems. But most frequently the
cases brought to us were sorrowful ones, in
which we could render no help.

One day a poor woman, who received a
quarterly allowance through our office from the
relieving-officer of her father's parish, came to
us half broken-hearted because her landlord, a
wealthy and titled gentleman, insisted upon her
sending her father to the workhouse—a blind,
paralytic, and childish old man, whom she had
to tend like an infant—as he had made it a rule
upon his estate that no "lodgers" should be kept
by any of his tenants. The woman felt, as any
other tender true-hearted daughter would feel;
and she had a vague notion, a common one
among the poor, that if the Queen could only
know her wrongs, she would remove them.
Another time, a destitute, depressed looking
girl came to ask how much it would cost to send
a piece of her mother's shroud to her brother in
Australia, as a sure token, she said, weeping,
that he would see her face no more. Fancy the
mail steamer freighted—for to us and the orphan
it bore no other burden—with a shred of a
mother's shroud, crossing those thousands of
miles of ocean to bear testimony to a wider and
more impassable separation. One more story of
the poor, with whom we were necessarily brought
into contact, and whose gratitude for very trivial
kindnesses, as with Wordsworth, "has often left
us mourning." At the time of the Crimean war, we
were directed to fasten a small pamphlet, containing
a list of the killed and wounded, upon the
outside of our office window, where every one could
turn over the doom-written leaves. Strange were
the faces, hard-featured, homely, weather-beaten
faces of working men and women, who clustered
round it from morning to night, and read aloud,
with slow and laboured effort, the names of our
lost soldiers in the East, proclaiming them in our
ears with a mournfully monotonous tone, until
the list grew familiar to us as our own registered
names in the family Bible. Now and then there
would be a murmur and thrill of recognition as
the hesitating voice of the reader pronounced
some name in the list of privates; and once a
poor washerwoman, who had set down her
basket for a minute to hear about the war, was
greeted with the name of her son as one among
the dead. She uttered one sharp cry, and then
knocked at the office window, and stood face to
face with us, the tears streaming down her
wrinkled face.

"It's my son!" she cried.

"Is he in the list?" we asked.

"It's my son, my son!" she repeated. She
could say no more; and, after a few minutes'
weeping, as if there were no more time for
sorrow, she passed on to her work, to the blessed
necessity of labour.

But the incidents of our office life were often
of an amusing character. Sometimes ladies who
made their Christian names as much a mystery
as their age, seemed to regard it as a personal
insult to be required to mention them. About
two or three years ago, when the slips called
money-order applications were issued free to the
public, an idea spread abroad that the money
orders themselves would be granted upon payment
merely of the commission, and we had quite
a run of demands for free orders; most of them
being to defray milliners' bills of long standing.
A tradesman, whom we knew to be almost
insolvent, came on a Sunday morning for a pound's-worth
of postage stamps; and, upon their being
handed over to him, and payment demanded, replied,
with sanctimonious gravity, that he had
not brought the money, as he thought " the
post-master might have a scruple against being paid
on a Sabbath!" We were, of course, compelled
to decline transacting Sunday post-office
business on such conscientious terms.

Now and then came brief snatches of
romance; romances that were never finished.
Once our interest was keenly excited by a fair
young face presented daily at the office window.
A frank face, with a childlike, guileless smile
in the dark eyes and upon the rosy lips. We
were skilful at " back-speiring," as the Scotch
call it, and we soon ascertained, without awakening
any suspicion, that Miss Columbell was residing
with a family in the town, under another
name, and with a rather fabulous history. Her
mother had been a laundress in a baronet's
household; and this girl, lovely enough to turn
any young man's head, had been married
clandestinely to the second son; the concealed
marriage only being confessed when the young
officer's regiment was ordered to the West
Indies. His parents, after some natural anger,
determined to make the best of the circumstances,
and proposed that their laundress's
daughter should remain in England during her
husband's absence, and reside with a former
governess, in order to receive an education in
some degree befitting her new position. So far
the story was true; but the stranger continued
her romance by narrating almost incredible
cruelties and indignities practised upon her after
her husband's departure, which had at last compelled
her to fly in secrecy from the home where
he had left her, and seek a refuge from her
persecutors at a safe distance. After this we
watched more keenly the open, ingenuous face,
which would have betrayed any physiognomist
into admiration, when she asked smilingly for
her secret letters. Even her present correspondent
she deceived, for, after she had left
the town, she forwarded letters from herself to
him, to be posted at our office,—a practice which
has since been prohibited, as only contributing
to purposes of deception. One of these letters,
sent to us open, contained a flower or two, which
she said had been gathered in our neighbourhood.
We had almost forgotten her, when one day two
gentlemen and a policeman called at our office
in prosecution of a search after the fugitive,
who had left no trace of her destination with