Page:All the Year Round - Series 1 - Volume 1.djvu/198

190 [Juue 18, 1969.] ALL THE YEAR ROUND. [Conducted by

in the would-be merry month of May, of this present year, I became a letter—a highly privileged, registered letter—thanks to Mr. Page, the Inspector-General of Mails.

I was sent to the post in the hands of a boy—a boy who had often posted my letters, and who now posted me. In the regular course of things I should have gone to the nearest office—a grocer's shop—where I should have reposed, for a time, within hearing of the grinding of a steam coffee-mill, the bumping of sugar-packets upon the counter, and within the fragrant influence of the pounded mocha. This was, however, prevented by another boy, who met my carrier, just as he was dallying with his charge, having twice put me into the hole devoted to the inland and colonial mails, without relinquishing his hold, and having twice withdrawn me in playful hesitation.

"Don't go a-chuckin' the letter in there," said the other boy.

"Why not?" asked my boy.

"Put 'em in a lamp-post broke short off," replied the other boy.

The two set off "up the road" for one of the pillar letter-boxes. Here much climbing, overing, and roughinspection of the novel office took place, and it was full ten minutes before I was dropped in. I felt as if I was sinking into the bowels of the earth, and I was much relieved when I found I had reached the bottom.

My companions were pretty numerous; but they were nearly all business letters. True, my pillar-box was in a business neighbourhood, not far from the chief office; but that was not alone sufficient to account for this fact. Although there are nearly twelve hundred of these useful traps set in different parts of the metropolis, to catch as many as possible of the five hundred and twenty-three millions of letters that flew last year, as thick as locusts, all over the land, there is a certain class of letters that never go into anything but a "regular" post-office, and probably never will. Any lady who could post a love-letter in one of the pillar-boxes must be an extremely unconventional, bold, and decided person, rather difficult to deal with harmoniously in the married state.

For this, and other reasons, my companions were full-sized, blue-wove, well-directed commercial letters; most of them announcing the approaching appearance of "our Mr. Binks," with well-assorted samples, in some expectant country town, and some of them conveying to some unsuspecting manufacturer the earliest intelligence of a heavy bad debt.

After we had rested together very peaceably for about an hour, the door of our temporary prison-house was opened by a scarlet postman. He looked in as a boy looks into a bird-trap which he has set in a field, or as a climbing urchin looks into a nest half full of eggs in the hollow of a tree. We were taken out without much ceremony or delay, and thrust into a bag; and in about ten minutes' time we found ourselves within the great inland sorting-office of the General Post-office.

Having been duly sorted, I am hurried, along with a crowd of companions, into a large bag, which is then sealed with a strong sealing-wax, and sent sliding down a smooth, shining, steep, inclined plane, into the daylight, and on to the platform of the Post-office northern court-yard. Here we find a number of guards and porters ready to receive us, in company with many other bags, and many really dismal, but rather would-be gay-looking, vehicles, drawn up to convey us to our different railway stations. These are the Post-office vans, furnished and horsed by contract, to the department, for a payment of ten thousand pounds per annum; and forming the only existing link that binds the railway-governed Post-office of to-day, to the mail-coach-governed Post-office of the past.

In shape, the Post-office van is like a prison-van; in colour it is a mixture of dingy black and red; and in condition it is dreadfully shattered and work-worn. Something of the hearse also mingles in its composition, and something of the omnibus. Its stand, when off duty, is at the end of Bedford-row, Holborn, where it basks in the sun, within a maze of posts, against the dead wall, looking with its companions like a crooked line of Chelsea pensioners waiting for the doctor. They are occasionally used as night-houses of refuge by the Arabs of St. Giles's, who have been known to ride in them asleep, to meet the morning mails at one of the railway stations.

In one of these vehicles I was stuffed with my companions, feeling very much (as the man must have felt who was placed in charge of us) as if I had been convicted of felony at the Old Bailey, and was going to a penal servitude of four years. Our destination was, however, Euston-square, and we were the first of some seventeen similar despatches in some seventeen similar vans, that form an unbroken stream between St. Martin's-le-Grand and the London and North-Western Railway terminus, every night from 7 to 8.30

When we arrived, we were received by responsible Post-office clerks, passed through a special entrance made, for us by the railway company in the side wall of the station, to save a few minutes of our valuable time, and deposited full in the front of our special train.

Our train was nearly all Post-office, and very little public. Those passengers who went by it had to pay a high tariff, and book their places some few days in advance. The train consisted of seven postal carriages and three passenger carriages (according to contract), all made up ready to start from 7 to 8.35 The passenger carriages were in front, the mail carriages behind, and the latter consisted of a sorting carriage and mail-bag van, or tender, for the