Her Majesty's Mails

The window, with tremendous gape, is assaulted with showers of papers which fly thicker and faster than the driven snow. Now it is that small boys of eleven and twelve years of age, panting, Sinbad-like, under the weight of huge bundles of newspapers, manage somehow to dart about and make rapid sorties into other ranks of boys, utterly disregarding the cries of the official policemen, who vainly endeavour to reduce the tumult into something like post-office order. If the lads cannot quietly and easily disembogue, they will whiz their missiles of intelligence over other people's heads, now and then sweeping off hats and caps with the force of shot. The gathering every moment increases in number and intensifies in purpose; arms, legs, sacks, baskets, heads, bundles, and woollen comforters--for whoever saw a veritable newspaper-boy without that appendage?--seem to be getting into a state of confusion and disagreeable communism, and "yet the cry is still they come." Heaps of papers of widely-opposed political views are thrown in together; no longer placed carefully in the openings, they are now sent in in sackfuls and basketfuls, while over the heads of the surging crowd were flying back the empty sacks, thrown out of the office by the porters inside. Semi-official legends, with a very strong smack of probability about them, tell of sundry boys being thrown in, seized, emptied, and thrown out again void. As six o'clock approaches still nearer and nearer, the turmoil increases more perceptibly, for the intelligent British public is fully alive to the awful truth that the Post-Office officials never allow a minute of grace, and that "Newspaper Fair" must be over when the last stroke of six is heard. One, in rush files of laggard boys who have purposely loitered, in the hope of a little pleasurable excitement; two, and grown men hurry in with their last sacks; three, the struggle resembles nothing so much as a pantomimic mêlée; four, a Babel of tongues vociferating desperately; five, final and furious showers of papers, sacks, and bags; and six, when all the windows fall like so many swords of Damocles, and the slits close with such a sudden and simultaneous snap, that we naturally suppose it to be a part of the Post-Office operations that attempts should be made to guillotine a score of hands; and then all is over so far as the outsiders are concerned.