The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

Again, when a mail was passing through a town between stages in the middle of the night, the postmaster, awoke by the postboy's horn, would present himself at an upper window and take in his bag by means of a hook and line, his body shivering the while in the cold night blast. An instance of such a proceeding is given by Williams in his history of Watford, where the destinies of the post were, at the time, presided over by a postmistress. "In response," says he, "to the thundering knock of the conductor, the old lady left her couch, and thrusting her head, covered with a wide bordered night-cap, out of the bedroom window, let down the mail bag by a string, and quickly returned to her bed again." Coming thus nightly to the open window in her night dress could not have been without its risks to a delicate creature like the postmistress. These postmasters required looking after occasionally, however, for they sometimes did wrong. In 1668 the postmaster of Edinburgh got into trouble by levying charges of 1d., 2d., or 3d. upon letters over and above the proper rates, and he was peremptorily ordered to discontinue the practice.