THE ROYAL MAIL.*

Mn. HYDE has brought together in the book before us a number of curious facts connected with the Post Office. He writes with the pardonable enthusiasm of an official in the upper grades of that institution, and this enthusiasm leads him at times into details which are of no interest to the general reader. On the whole, however, we can recommend his volume very warmly as full of interest and amusement, and without further preface will try to indicate the nature of its contents. Mr. Hyde begins ab ovo, of course, with some chapters on "Old Roads," " Postboys,"' " Stage and Mail-Coaches," &c. ; but he soon gets to work with • The Royal Mail : its Curiosities and Romance. By J. W. Hyde, Superin-.. teudent in the (eueral Post Office. Edinburgh : William Blackwood and Sone. .

his proper subject, and from his earlier pages we shall cull no more than a sentence from Mendelssohn's charming account of his coach experiences, and a possibly apocryphal anecdote. Says the great composer, " I sat on the box by the coachman, who asked me whether I flirted much, and made me talk a good deal, and taught me the slang of horsemanship." Mendelhsohn was a very handsome man, and this will explain the genial coachman's first query; but we have our doubts about the "slang of horsemanship" which he thought he had acquired. The anecdote runs thus, and marks the amari aliquid which rose, in the shape of hurriedly interrupted repasts, from the joys which travellers tasted in days when Englishmen were heartier and kindlier, on the road, at all events, than they are at present :—

" One passenger was equal to the occasion. Leisurely sipping his tea and eating his toast, this traveller was found by the landlord in the breakfast-room. When the other passengers were seated, and the coach was on the point of starting, Boniface appealed to

him to take his place, or he would be left behind. Bat,' replied the traveller, ' that I will not do till I have a spoon to sup my egg.' A glance apprised the landlord that not a spoon adorned the table, and, rushing out, he detained the coach while all the passengers were searched for the missing articles. Then out came the satisfied traveller, who also submitted to be searched, and afterwards mounted the coach ; and, as the coach drove off, he called to the landlord to look inside the teapot, where the artful traveller had placed the dozen spoons, with the doable object of cooling the tea for his second cap and detaining the coach till he drank it."

In his chapter on the "Amount of Work" done by the Post Office, Mr. Hyde has many striking facts to record. They are not, of course, so novel as they are striking; but many readers will be glad to have them here in a permanent form. Quite in accordance with Buckle's anticipation, we find that letters posted without addresses number 28,000 in a year, and that the value found in these "derelict missives" is usually about £8,000. And now let the reader ask himself,—If 478,000 newspapers are sent yearly to the Dead-letter Office, and (nearly) 600,000 post-cards, how many book-packets would be likely to reach the same destina- tion P As a matter of fact, 5,000,000 do ! For circulars are classed as book-packets ; and the addresses on circulars, says Mr. Hyde, are often taken by advertisers from old directions or other unreliable sources. The " apparatus " by which mail-bags are dropped and received by trains going at full speed is described at some length by Mr. Hyde, but not quite so clearly as we could wish. Any one who has seen the " apparatus " at work will readily follow his description ; those who have not, and are not gifted with a capacity for mechanics, will find it hard to do. All, however, will appreciate the difficulties which have to be overcome by the men who work this truly Archimedean con- trivance :—

" For arms and nets must not, for fear of accidents, be extended anywhere but at the appointed places, and within 200 or 300 yards of where the exchange of mails is to take place. The operators, in timing the delivery, are guided by certain features of the country they are passing through, as well as by their estimate of the speed at which the train is running. When the nights are clear, a trained operator can easily recognise his marks ; but in a very dark night, or during a fog, his skill and experience are put to the test. On each occasions he seems to be guided by the promptings of his collective senses. He puts his face close to the window, shutting off the light from the carriage with his hands, trying to recognise some wayside object, he listens to the noise made by the train, estimates the speed of travelling, and by these means he judges of his position, and effects the exehange of the mails. It is, indeed, marvellous that so few failures take place ; but this is an instance of how, by constant application and experience, things are accomplished which might at first sight be considered well-nigh impossible."

Mr. Hyde waxes eloquent and even poetical over the sorters employed by the Post Office. Soldiers, sailors, village black- smiths, tillers of the soil, woodmen, and even tailors " have formed the theme of song ;" but our sorters are a race unsung.

They will find their vates sacer some day, no doubt; and we trust that when he comes he will eschew Mr. Hyde's abominable word "sortafion." Meanwhile, we gladly quote some remarks of his on a sorter's qualifications. "These are," he says, "self- command—necessary when working against time ; activity in his person so as to meet any sudden strain of work; a methodical habit, and, the sine qud non of a sorter, a quick, prehensile, and retentive memory. So much has a sorter to learn; that a man without a head can never distinguish himself ; and an edu- cational test, except as a measure of acquirements in a collateral way, is of very little use. A sorter's success rests chiefly upon natural aptitude." True enough, no doubt, and applicable to many besides sorters; nor will the "educational test" deserve or gain much more approval than this from practical men till it is applied by examiners who have themselves a " natural aptitude " for the vocation to which they have been called.

We must omit, we find, a great many " curiosities " which we had marked for extract in Mr. Hyde's chapters on the "Pigeon Post," on "Abase of the Franking Privilege, and other Petty Frauds," on " Strange Addresses," and on " Telegraphic Blunders." But these titles are suggestive enough of amusing reading, and space forbids us from quoting more than a single abuse of the franking privilege, whereby a "Dr. Crichton, carrying with him a cow and divers other necessaries," was not, as Mr. Hyde gravely says, " actually passed through the post- office," but was admitted for transport on board the special packet-ships of Government. Under the head of " Petty Frauds" are given some answers in reply to the following advertisement: —" An elderly bachelor of fortune, wishing to test the credulity of the public, and to benefit and assist others, will send a suitable present of genuine worth to all who will send him seventeen stamps—demanded merely as a token of confidence."

The number of stamps which this swindler received may be guessed from the fact that between 300 and 400 letters, each containing seventeen stamps, reached the Dead-letter Office—

owing, doubtless, to his having "moved on" from the places where be had lived, in consequence of their becoming too warm to hold him.

The chapter describing " How Letters are Lost" is, if not the most amusing, the most instructive in this book. It opens with a statement which, coming from one who writes as Mr- Hyde does, with authority, is ominous. "It is quite a common occurrence," he says, " for letters—especially letters of a small size—which are dropped into a letter-box, to slip inside newspapers or book-packets, and miscarry." There are other causes at work to bring about this consummation, and chief amongst these is the almost incredible carelessness which is often shown when money and other valuables are sent unregistered. Mr. Hyde good-naturedly attributes this care-

lessness to the confidence which the public place in the servants of the Post Office ; and the most flattering specimen of this con- fidence, he says, "fell to be performed by a person at Leeds,

who, desiring to send a remittance to a friend, folded a five- pound note in two, wrote the address on the back of it, and without cover or registration consigned it to the letter-box." Some very curious stories are told in this book of letters inter- cepted by rats and birds; and the fate of a cheque for £1,000 that was recently dropped on London Bridge daring a snowstorm and cast into the Thames with the snow, might support the thesis that paper born to be burnt can never be drowned. The cheque in question was found adhering to a block of ice off Deptford, and restored to the firm who drew it. Under the head of " Odd Complaints," Mr. Hyde quotes with great glee Mr. Trollope's inimitable account of his adventure with "a gentleman in county Cavan." It is certainly a gem in its way, and Mr. Hyde has capped it with some excellent stories from other sources.

" Singular Coincidences " form the subject of the next chapter, and these are succeeded by " Savings-Bank Curiosities." From

the latter we extract the following snorceau :- " The envelopes supplied to depositors, in which they send their books to head-quarters, have within the flap a space provided to receive the depositor's address, and the request is printed underneath, State here whether the above address is permanent.' This request has called forth such rejoinders as these,—' Here we have no con- tinuing city ;" This is not our rest;' Heaven is our home ;" Yes, D.V.' In one case the reply was No, D.V., for the place is beastly damp and unhealthy ;' while another depositor being floored by the wording of the inquiry, wrote, Doant know what " permanent " is.' "

Dr. Lewis, who held the post of Medical Officer in the General Post Office, London, for many years, has supplied Mr. Hyde with samples of some answers received to his medical inquiries concerning applicants for employment. " Father had sunstroke, and I caught it of him ;" " I caught Tiber fever in the Hackney Road ;" "I had burralyer in the head ;" "My sister died of compulsion," are samples of these samples. Mr. Hyde hopes that the absence of such answers from future schedules will testify to the work of the School Boards. We hope so, too.

Mr. Hyde has a good word for the much-ridiculed Mnlready Envelope. He is clearly, as we have already implied, a most good-natured man. There might, of course, be something to say of such an envelope, which obviated the use of adhesive stamps ; but the envelopes with embossed stamps, which are

now sold at the rate of twenty for nineteenpence, seem the ne plus ultra of cheapness and convenience. Still, if the Mulready envelopes were sold. for a penny a piece, it is abundantly clear

now that their destruction, effected with so much difficulty, was absurdly wasteful.

We have little further to say of this pleasant book, beyond asking Mr. Hyde quite good-humouredly what authority he has for saying that Ovid tells us that Taurosthenes used the pigeon-post. Tanrosthenes is a word that for metrical reasons cannot be found in any of the poems of Ovid that have reached us. Is it possible that we are on the track here of a quotation from his " Medea "P Mr. Hyde's final sentence may well serve to end this notice with, for, in addition to the amusement which he has given his readers, he has also given them information of the most trustworthy kind, which will win their credit for his not un- becoming boast on behalf of an institution of which he is not unbecomingly proud. " It may be admitted," he says, " of the Post Office, that of all its characteristics the most prominent is that of its routine, method, and red-tapeism, in the limited sense of what is necessary for the furtherance of the public service; but there is, perhaps, no concern of like magnitude in the world in which there is less of the musty, fusty red-tape of antiquity that has outgrown its time, and no longer serves any useful purpose."