Her Majesty's Mails

In the letter-room the officers are no less busily engaged: a number of them are constantly at work during the hours of the despatch, in the operation of placing each letter with the address and postage label uppermost, so as to facilitate the process of stamping. In the General Post-Office the stamping is partly effected by machinery and partly by hand, and consists simply in imprinting upon each letter the date, hour, and place of posting, while at the same time the Queen's head with which the letter is ornamented and franked gets disfigured.[154] It will easily be imagined that a letter containing a box of pills stands a very good chance of being damaged under this manipulation, as a good stamper will strike about fifty letters in a minute. Unpaid letters are kept apart, as they require stamping in a different coloured ink and with the double postage. Such letters create much extra labour, and are a source of incessant trouble to the Department, inasmuch as from the time of their posting in London to their delivery at the Land's End or John O'Groat's, every officer through whose hands they may pass has to keep a cash account of them. The double postage on such letters is more than earned by the Post-Office. All unfastened and torn letters, too, are picked out and conveyed to another portion of the large room, and it requires the unremitting attention of several busy individuals to finish the work left undone by the British public. It is scarcely credible that above 250 letters daily are posted open, and bearing not the slightest mark of ever having been fastened in any way; but such is the fact. A fruitful source of extra work to this branch of the office arises through the posting of flimsy boxes containing feathers, slippers, and other récherché articles of female dress, pill-boxes containing jewellery, and even bottles. The latter, however, are detained, glass articles and sharp instruments of any sort, whenever detected, being returned to the senders. These frail things, thrown in and buried under the heaps of correspondence, get crushed and broken, yet all are made up again carefully and resealed.