The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

“MY LORD,— I, John Jolly, of ——, have conveyed her Majesty's mails over hedges, ditches, and stone walls, and I, John Jolly, have never been properly paid for the same.” (Here it is thought he lost his temper and his limited vocabulary of decent words.) “And I, John Jolly, will see the Postmaster-General damned before I, John Jolly, do it again.” Many Post Office memorialists probably mean this when they approach the Postmaster-General as “obedient servants,” but they have not been trained on the road. CHAPTER VIII THE UNDELIVERED POSTAL PACKET It is often brought as a reproach against the General Post Office that while it occasionally fails to deliver a letter which is only slightly incorrect in its address, it frequently succeeds if the address is entirely wrong or is more or less unintelligible to the average reader. But Post Office men and women have the ordinary human point of view, and we must not blame them for sometimes despising the solution of simple difficulties and laying themselves out to solve the larger problems of official life. Like Naaman, they prefer to be asked to do some great thing. For one reason, both their chiefs and the public will give them more credit for solving an apparently hopeless puzzle than for suggesting a way out of an easy difficulty. They may have in the one case a paragraph all to themselves in the Daily Mail: in the other case they will not even be thanked by the man who receives the letter, and who is not modest enough to be surprised because he is known to the Post Office in spite of an imperfect address.