Her Majesty's Mails

In all this consists the prose of Post-Office life; but who shall describe its poetry? Scarcely a day passes in any of our provincial post-offices without some incident occurring calculated to surprise, amuse, or sadden. Very probably within a few minutes one person will have come to make a complaint that a certain letter or letters ought to have arrived, and must have been kept back; another will make an equally unreasonable request, or propound some strange inquiry which the poor post-office clerk is supposed to be omniscient enough to answer. Most often, however, the cases of inquiry disclose sorrowful facts, and all the consolation which can be offered--supposing that the clerk has any of "the milk of human kindness" in him, a quality of mind or heart, much too rare, we confess, in the Post-Office service--will likely be the consolation of hope. The official sees now and then brief snatches of romance; perhaps the beginning or the end, though seldom the transaction throughout. Amusing circumstances are often brought out by requests tendered at the Post-Office, that letters which have been posted may be returned to the writers. A formal, but most essential rule, makes letters once posted the property of the Postmaster-General until they are delivered as addressed, and must not be given up to the writers on any pretence whatever. One or two requests of this kind related to us we are not likely soon to forget. On one occasion, a gentlemanly-looking commercial traveller called at an office and expressed a fear that he had inclosed two letters in wrong envelopes, the addresses of which he furnished. It appeared from the account which he reluctantly gave, after a refusal to grant his request, that his position and prospects depended upon his getting his letters, and correcting the mistakes, inasmuch as they revealed plans which he had adopted to serve two mercantile houses in the same line of business, whose interests clashed at every point. He failed to get his letters, but we hope he has retrieved himself, and is now serving one master faithfully.