Page:The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago.djvu/140

72 officer, whose duty consisted in superintending the assorting of letters at the Central Office.

"Did you ever happen to detect the secreting of letters?—Not often; I was once at an unpleasant concern of that kind: unfortunately those cases have very often occurred, but I cannot say that I individually detected any other person.

"In those instances in which letters have been lost, letters carrying money for instance, has a detection taken place frequently in the office?—No, not often.

"How has the detection taken place?—It used to do more when the paper circulation took place, the notes used to be traced to the parties, they used to be passed off in the neighbourhood of the letter carrier, they used to be traced by the solicitor: but certainly detection in the office is of rare occurrence."

I am indebted to Mr. G. Napier, Advocate Depute, for the following interesting account of the discovery and conviction of an offender in the Edinburgh Post Office, who had abstracted a bank note from a letter. The trial took place at Edinburgh, in March, 1834.

In January, 1834, Mr. Duncan, a merchant at Liverpool, put into the Post Office there a letter addressed to his mother, at Broughty Ferry, in Forfarshire, and containing a Bank of England note for £50 sterling. The letter, which had been expected on a particular day, not having reached the old lady, she immediately wrote to her son on the subject, and he again, being a mercantile man, and having kept a memorandum of the date and number of the note, immediately wrote to the Bank of England to stop payment of it. Inquiry was also immediately made at the different post offices of Liverpool, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Broughty Ferry, through all of which it should have passed in the proper course of transmission to the place of destination, but no trace of it could thus be got; no trace as to where it was lost, or even that it had ever been seen in the possession of the Post Office at all. All that could be learned was, that the letter