MAIL-GUARDS 2^1 



jiardonable exaggeration, said that the Post Office 

 had conferred a licence for indiscriminate slaughter 

 upon them ; for not only were they armed against 

 attack, hut during the wars with France (and we 

 were always fighting the French in those days) 

 the Postmaster-General issued a kind of commission 

 to mail-guards to shoot any prisoner of war break- 

 ing parole. To promote zeal in this direction, a 

 reward of £5 was offered for every prisoner so 

 winged or killed. Prisoners of war were plentiful 

 then, and in Edinburgh Castle, on Dartmoor, and 

 at "Yaxley Barracks," near Norman Cross, on the 

 Great North lload, were to be counted in thousands. 

 At Yaxley, as also perhaps at other places, they 

 were often allowed out on parole, with the under- 

 standing that they were not to leave the high road 

 and were not to remain out after sunset. It is not 

 on record that any prisoner was thus shot, Ijut 

 many inoffensive rustics were wounded by guards 

 sportively inclined, or — with what St. Paul calls 

 a "zeal not according to discretion" — eager to 

 earn the reward offered. 



The mail-guards were, indeed, very dangerous 

 fellows to the law-abiding subjects of the Xing, 

 however innocuous they may have been to 

 the law-breakers. We may dismiss the cutlass 

 with which they were armed. Not much 

 damage could be accidentally wrought by that; 

 but the blunderbuss was a terror to nervous 

 passengers by the mail, for when the guard 

 sportively loosed it off at the wayside sparrows, 

 or at the ploughman busy against the sky-line, it 



