Her Majesty's Mails

Every provision is supplied by the authorities in London, and salaries and pensions of all kinds are granted. Thus, in one place, a chaplain is appointed for the crew of one of the packets, with a small stipend, "for doing their offices of births, marriage, and burial." Pensions for wounds received in the service are granted with nice discrimination of the relative parts of the body. In a letter to their agent at Falmouth, the Postmasters-General send a scale of pensions to be granted according to the kind of wound--thus: "For every arm or leg amputated above the elbow or knee, L.8 per annum; below the arm or knee, twenty nobles. Loss of the sight of one eye must be L.4; of the pupil of the eye, L.5; of the sight of both eyes, L.12; of the pupils of both eyes, L.14; and according to these rules, we consider also how much also the hurts affect the body, and make the allowances accordingly." The duties devolving upon the chief Post-Office officials seem not only to have been onerous and heavy--some of their instructions to their agents bearing dates from the middle of the night and other extraordinary hours--but curiously varied. Many of their letters are preserved among the old records in the vaults under the General Post-Office, and some of them are quite sad and plaintive in their tone. "We are concerned," they say to one agent, "to find the letters brought by your boat [one from the West Indies] to be so consumed by the ratts, that we cannot find out to whom they belong." Another letter to their agent at Harwich is evidently disciplinary, and runs as follows:--