the friends she had been visiting. One of the
gentlemen, frantic with anxiety, and apparently
just recovered from a severe illness, was the
husband, returned, after two years' absence, to
find all clue to his young wife lost. Never shall
we forget the eagerness with which he received
the address of the letters forwarded by us,
though we had ascertained that it was only to
some offices in London. Whether he ever found
her, we never knew.

Another crisis in a life's history we saw
finished. A tradesman's daughter, who had
been for some time engaged to a prosperous
young draper in a neighbouring town, heard
from one whom she and her parents considered
credible authority, that he was on the verge of
bankruptcy. Not a day was to be lost in breaking
the bond, by which she and her small
fortune were linked to poverty. A letter, strong
and conclusive in its language, was at once
written and safely deposited in the post-office,
when the same informant called upon the young
lady's friends to contradict and explain his
previous statement, which had arisen out of some
misunderstanding. They rushed to us at once,
and no words can describe the scene; the
reiterated appeals, the tears, the wringing of hands,
the united entreaties of father, mother, and
daughter, for us to restore their fatal letter.
But the rule admitted of no exceptions—that a
letter once posted could not be restored to any
applicant; not even to the writer himself. It
was but in the next room, this fatal epistle, and
nothing but a formal but most essential rule
stood between them and their rejected
prospects. The circumstance was not of any lasting
importance, however. Each lover married somebody
else, and was, no doubt, quite as happy.

Never, surely, has any one a better chance of
seeing himself as others see him than a country
postmaster. Letters of complaint very securely
enveloped and sealed passed through our hands,
addressed to the Postmaster-General, and then
came back to us for our own perusal and explanation.
One of our neighbours informed the
Postmaster-General, in confidence, that we were
"ignorant and stupid." A clergyman wrote a
pathetic remonstrance, stating that he was so
often disappointed of his Morning Star and
Dial, that he had come to the conclusion
that we disapproved of that paper for the
clergy; and from scruples of conscience, or
political motives, prevented it—one of four
hundred passing daily through our office—from
reaching his hands whenever there was anything
we considered objectionable in it. Two
characteristics marked every complaint; the
extreme regret of the British public at being
compelled, after much long-suffering, to find
fault, and the serious importance of every letter
lost or mis-sent, among the hundred thousands
circulating in all directions each day. In our
own "dead-letter" bag about twelve a day
were sent up to London, from our inability to
discover the persons to whom they had been
written. In 1859, the number of letters
returned to the writers from the dead-letter
office was one million nine hundred
thousand; nearly half of them being insufficiently or
incorrectly addressed; and more than eleven
thousand posted with no direction at all. From
the same causes four hundred and seventy
thousand newspapers were undelivered.

It is as little understood with what zeal and
honourable enthusiasm a great deal of the
post-office service is performed, as it is considered
how important and necessary it is that this
public duty should be transacted upon higher
principles than those entering into ordinary
business. When the Violet mail-packet
between Ostend and Dover was lost in 1856, the
officer in charge, seeing that the vessel could
not be saved, must have spent the last minutes
of his life in removing the cases which contained
the mail-bags, and so placing them that they
floated, when the ship and its crew went down.
On another occasion, the mail-master of a
Canadian steamer sacrificed his life, when he might
have escaped, by going below to secure the mails
entrusted to him. I know among our own
little staff of servants, hard-worked and underpaid,
there is no deficiency of a laudable desire
to do their work with spirit and exactness.
"They shall press me into the earth," said
one of our rural messengers, referring to the
unreasonable demands of the public, " but I will
do my duty!" On our own parts, how often
have we done, what every official in the public
service has to do, steadily turned away from our
domestic interests, whether of joy or sorrow,
and bent our minds from them into a diligent
attendance upon the responsibilities devolving
upon us.

SOME CURIOUS LIGHTS.

AT the end of the sixteenth century a certain
old Vincenzo Cascariolo, of Bologna, cobbler by
profession, alchemist by practice, went out one
summer Sunday evening to take a walk as far as
the Monte Paterno. On his way thither,
peering about to see if he could not find some sort
of key, no matter what, which should unlock
the great gate leading into the illimitable
goldfields of Nature, he picked up a stone—a stone
like any other stone to look at, but something
heavier in the hand to feel. A thought struck
him. Always on the look-out for the universal
solvent, the alkahest, the menstruum which
should turn his copper to gold, and raise his
cobbler's lapstone to a patrician's emblem, it
suddenly occurred to him that, as this stone
had one of the properties of gold, namely, its
weight, it might be found on investigation to
contain the body of gold itself, and to be one of
the links in the chain sought to be knit up. He
went back to his furnaces and his awls, put his
stone into a crucible, and calcined it; but he got
no gold; only a body "which absorbs the rays
of the sun by day to emit them by night." In
other words, he had made the famous phosphorescent
Bologna stone, the Lapis solaris of old
days, scientifically known in these days as the