R. F. D. 187 



twenty-five years, though sometimes a six-horse sled 

 had to precede her to break the drifts. Scattered along 

 her path are little white houses and big gray barns. 

 In front of each house is a tin mail box on a post or 

 tree. The rattle of her buggy wheels or the jingle 

 of her sleigh-bells down the road proclaims her coming, 

 and even if she bears no mail for the waiting box she 

 bears a greeting and a bit of gossip for the housewife 

 in the door. I see her pass out of our village every 

 day, with her mail bags around her feet, and she seems 

 to me a symbol of the simpler, rural America that was 

 once so close to the consciousness of all of us, and which 

 we are but now beginning to realize must not be allowed 

 to perish or we perish, too, the victims of a top-heavy 

 industrialism and prohibitive food prices. 



The Rural Free Delivery marks the outmost ex- 

 tension of our great postal service, and like all institu- 

 tions on the frontier it is less mechanical and more 

 human than the central portions of the system. In 

 the city post offices, men are machines; mail wagons or 

 motor trucks are juggernauts, letters are shot through 

 tubes and sped toward their destination on trains. 

 But the system is already less impersonal before the ru- 

 ral deliverer receives his pouches and packets. They 

 are often given to him in a small office where familiar- 

 ity reigns, and the postmaster or mistress peers at 

 you as you enter the door, and has your letters waiting 

 when you reach the little arched window. In such a 



