The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

In 1883, a registered letter sent from Dunkeld on a given date was duly received in Edinburgh, and delivered at its address, which was a bank, the postman obtaining a signature to the receipt-form in the usual way. Some little time afterwards complaint was made by the manager of the bank that the letter had not been received; but the Post-office was able to prove the contrary by the receipt, the signature to which, on being submitted to the manager, was acknowledged to be that of the wife of the housekeeper of the establishment. Yet this person could give no account of the letter, nor had any one else seen it; and as the letter was stated to have contained four L1 notes and a bank deposit-book, the fact of its disappearance gave rise to a state of things which can be better imagined than described. The Post-office, in the circumstances, offered the suggestion that the bank's waste-paper should be carefully examined. As it happened, however, a quantity of this material had just been cleared out, having been purchased by a waste-paper dealer; and the fact made the chances of recovery in that direction all the more remote. Yet the housekeeper was set to work: he traced the bags first to the store of the dealer, then to the premises of a waste-paper merchant in another part of the city. With assistance he carefully examined the contents of the bags filled at the bank, and his efforts were rewarded by the discovery of the registered letter, which was in precisely the same state as when delivered, never having been opened. It had very likely fallen from a desk in the bank on to the floor, and by a careless person been brushed aside with used envelopes and scraps of paper, thus finding its way into the waste-paper basket.