Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 8.djvu/394

360 incessant flow of letters and papers is only interrupted when approaching some important junction where mail is delivered and received from connecting lines or post-offices. Everything presents a weird aspect in a railway-station at midnight,—men flit about in a dazed way with satchels, the bright light bursting through the doorway of the car gives a ghastly look to the face of the man who throws in the pouches and sacks, and all appear like ghosts that will vanish with the approach of dawn; but we realize the substance of our surroundings when we again turn our attention to the busy scene in the car. The city distribution of letters—a feature of the service on night-trains which has greatly facilitated the early delivery of mails in a few of the larger cities—has been extended to other cities, and others are still to receive its benefit. For instance, clerks from the Boston post-office detailed to do this duty enter the mail-car at the Boston and Albany Railway at Springfield, Massachusetts, and sort the city letters by carriers' routes, post-office box sections, banks, insurance offices, etc. The corresponding train moving in the opposite direction is boarded by New York post-office clerks making similar separations.

The packages of letters thus made up go direct to their respective divisions in the post-office, thereby avoiding the delay that would be caused in passing through other preliminary distributing departments. This work has been taken up recently by the Railway Mail Service, the plan enlarged and extended, and added to the other duties of the clerks. Additional clerks, however, have been employed to perform this work, yet the others are required to know it, and on lines where additional clerks were not appointed, to make it their regular duty.

A glance has been given at one of the many links in the continuous chains of connections that cross and recross the face of the country. A comparison of the oldtime method and of the railway post-office service will show the superior advantage of the latter. At some remote hamlet in Nova Scotia, a letter is started for San Francisco, California. It crosses the boundary line into the United States and enters at once the swelling current at Vanceborough, Maine. Leaving that place at 1.35, Monday, without delay it reaches Boston at 5.10 , is transferred across the city, leaves at 6.00 , connecting with the fast mail train from New York City at Albany, through Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, reaches Cleveland at 6.00 , Tuesday, and Chicago at 6.00 , Wednesday, where an intermission of six hours makes the longest delay in the line of connection. The next morning, Thursday, at 11. , Omaha is reached; Friday, at 6.00, Laramie, Wyoming; Saturday, at 6.00 , Ogden, Utah; Sunday, Humboldt, Nevada; and Monday, at 11.00 , San Francisco. This illustration has been made to show the far-reaching continuity of connecting lines across the country, passing through many of the principal cities but not entering a post-office for distribution, rather than a complexity of connections almost innumerable in a thickly-settled country, and over which study and patient inquiry to simplify are ever at work.

Lyons, Wayne County, New York, is located on the New York Central Railway; a letter is started from that place for Leeds, Franklin County, Massachusetts; it is received into the New York