The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

A packet done up in a piece of brown paper, unsealed, but tied with string, was found to contain a small quantity of trimming, a collar-box with a few paper-collars, and inside the box were two L1 notes and 10s. in silver. A halfpenny wrapper was used to serve as a covering for the transmission of a letter, a bill of sale, and four L5 Bank of England notes. In a newspaper which reached the Dead-letter Office were found four sovereigns, and in another a gold locket. A packet carelessly rolled up was seen to contain a sovereign, two half-sovereigns, and a savings-bank book. In several instances coins have been found imbedded in cake and pieces of toast; and on one occasion gold coins of the value of L1, 10s. were discovered in a large seal at the back of a letter, the gold pieces having come to light through the wax getting slightly chipped. But the most flattering act of confidence in the probity of the Post-office fell to be performed by a person at Leeds, who, desiring to send a remittance to a friend, folded a five-pound note in two, wrote the address on the back of it, and, without cover or registration, consigned it to the letter-box. Petty frauds are committed on the Post-office to a large extent by the senders of newspapers, who infringe the rules by enclosing all sorts of things between the leaves--such as cigars and tobacco, collars, sea-weed, ferns and flowers, gloves, handkerchiefs, music, patterns, sermons, stockings, postage-stamps, and so on. People in the United States and Canada are much given to these practices, as shown by the fact that in one-half of the year 1874, more than 14,000 newspapers were detected with such articles secreted in them.