Page:British India Adhesive Stamps Surcharged for Native States.djvu/60

 The Durbar maintains 117 Post Offices and several hundred miles of postal lines. The number of postal articles dealt with by the State Post Office during 1896-97 was nearly nine millions.

The City of Lashkar and the neighbouring cantonment of Morar contain nearly 130,000 inhabitants, and Ujjain nearly 35,000.

In dealing with the stamps of this State, the first thing that strikes one is the fact that the surcharge is quite different from that of any other of the "convention" States. Instead of a surcharge "Gwalior State," Scindia's Government has always preferred the one word "Gwalior" in English and in Hindi. It introduced service stamps in 1895 only, and, remembering that most of the officials who would use these stamps would be ignorant of English, it asked for a purely Hindi surcharge.

The other point which differentiates it from the two States which we have hitherto considered is that there are four distinct varieties of surcharge in the ordinary stamps and that three of them are obsolete. We have therefore the advantage of finality in these issues.

These varieties are characterised as follows:—

.—The surcharge in Hindi is at the top of the stamp, and that in English at the bottom, both in black. This variety occurs with the Hindi surcharge printed in two sizes, in one of them the vernacular letters being from a smaller fount (fig. 1.) and both sizes occurring in the same sheet in the proportion of about one of the former to three of the latter. The measurements of the surcharges are:—

The interval between the surcharges on the "Star" watermarked stamps of this issue varies from 16 to 17 millimètres,