The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

In the London Metropolitan district there are employed 4030 postmen; and taking their daily amount of walking at 12 miles on the average--a very low estimate--this would represent an aggregate daily journeying on foot of 48,360 miles, or equal to twice the circumference of our globe. Articles of many curious kinds have been observed passing through the post from time to time, some of them dangerous or prohibited articles, which, according to rule, are sent to the Returned-letter Office--the fact showing that the Post-office is not only called upon to perform its first duty of expeditiously conveying the correspondence intrusted to it, but is made the vehicle for the carriage of small articles of almost endless variety. Some of these are the following, many of them having been in a live state when posted--viz., beetles, blind-worms, bees, caterpillars, crayfish, crabs, dormice, goldfinches, frogs, horned frogs, gentles, kingfishers, leeches, moles, owls, rabbits, rats, squirrels, stoats, snails, snakes, silk-worms, sparrows, stag-beetles, tortoises, white mice; artificial teeth, artificial eyes, cartridges, china ornaments, Devonshire cream, eggs, geranium-cuttings, glazier's diamonds, gun-cotton, horseshoe nails, mince-pies, musical instruments, ointments, perfumery, pork-pies, revolvers, sausages, tobacco and cigars, &c., &c. Occasionally the sending of live reptiles through the Post-office gives rise to interruption to the work, as has occurred when snakes have escaped from the packets in which they had been enclosed. The sorters, not knowing whether the creatures are venomous or not, are naturally chary in the matter of laying hold of them; and it may readily be conceived how the work would be interfered with in the limited space of a Travelling Post-office carriage containing half-a-dozen sorters, upon a considerable snake showing his activity among the correspondence, as has in reality happened.