THE POST OFFICE. 265 



many others at greater distances, which now have 

 two or more deliveries of letters from London in the 

 course of the day. 



I do not know exactly how the hours of receipt 

 and despatch of letters may be arranged, but it 

 is quite clear that, as regards the time required, a 

 letter might be posted in London in the morning, 

 addressed to a person in a town 100 miles distant, 

 and a reply received the same evening. This is 

 somewhat more expeditious than the instance I have 

 mentioned of a letter and the reply requiring a period 

 ,of five or six days for their respective journeys by the 

 road-mail. 



I daresay some of the old road-mail guards are 

 acting in the same capacity on the railways ; and if so, 

 they will no doubt have contrasted the difference 

 between the modes of delivering and taking up the 

 letter-bags at the post-offices in the difi"erent towns 

 and villages on their route when with the mail-coach, 

 and the method in which that duty is now accomp- 

 lished ; with little to be done on their parts, but with 

 an ingenious piece of machinery attached to the mail- 

 van and to various posts along the line of railway, by 

 which the letter-bags are dropped or taken up in the 

 dead of the night, while the train is travelling at a 

 rate of thirty or forty miles an hour, or more. 



Among other things which were seen only by 



