Her Majesty's Mails

If any registered letters are of the number to be sent, the name of each addressee is carefully written on the letter-bill. Private and locked bags for the country gentry still survive, and may be obtained for an annual fee of two guineas. They are attended to with some care, and are carried to their destination with the other made-up bags. When the mails are ready, they are sent from the Post-Office in various ways. Those for one or two country roads are sent to a local railway station, and taken in charge by the railway guard, who drops the bags at the different points on the line according to their address; others are carried by mail gigs under one or more private contractors, while the rest are taken by country-walking postmen, who make certain journeys during the day, returning in the evening with the letters and bags they have gathered during their travels. Of course the rural messengers take out loose letters as well; e. g. those for detached dwellings on their line of road. Our letter falls into the hands of one of those hard-working and deserving men.[164] The village, or rather hamlet, to which it is addressed is too small for a post-office, but a rural postman passes through it on his daily journeyings about ten o'clock each morning, delivering with scrupulous fidelity everything committed to his care. Thus, posted where we saw it last night, it passes from hand to hand all through the long night, and eventually reaches that hand for which it was intended 300 odd miles away, nearly as surely as if we had travelled to deliver it ourselves.