In 1781 the postal staff in Edinburgh was composed of twenty-three persons, of whom six were letter-carriers. The indoor staff of the Glasgow Post Office in 1789 consisted of the postmaster and one clerk, and as ten years later there were only four postmen employed, the outdoor force in 1789 was probably only four men. Liverpool, in the year 1792, when its population stood at something like 60,000, had only three postmen, whose wages were 7s. a week each. One of the men, however, was assisted by his wife, and for this service the Post Office allowed her from L10 to L12 a year. Their duties seem to have been carried out in an easy-going, deliberate fashion. The men arranged the letters for distribution in the early morning, then they partook of breakfast, and started on their rounds about 9 A.M., completing their delivery about the middle of the afternoon. It would thus seem that a hundred years ago there was but one delivery daily in Liverpool. During the same period there were only three letter-carriers employed at Manchester, four at Bristol, and three or four at Birmingham. In our own times the number of postmen serving these large towns may be counted by the hundreds, or, I might almost say, thousands. The delivery of letters in former times was necessarily a slow affair, for two reasons, namely:--that prepayment was not compulsory, and the senders of letters thoughtfully left the receivers to pay for them, when the postmen would often be kept waiting for the money. And secondly, streets were not named and numbered systematically as they now are, and concise addresses were impossible. It is no doubt the case that order and method in laying out the streets and in regulating generally the buildings of towns are things of quite modern growth. In old-fashioned towns we find the streets running at all angles to one another, and describing all sorts of curves, without any regard whatever to general harmony. And will it be believed that the numbering of the houses in streets is comparatively a modern arrangement! Walter Thornbury tells us in his _Haunted London_ that "names were first put on doors in 1760 (some years before the street signs were removed). In 1764 houses were first numbered, the numbering commencing in New Burleigh Street, and Lincoln's-Inn-Fields being the second place numbered." While in our own time the addresses of letters are generally brief and direct, it is not to be wondered at that, under the conditions above stated, the superscriptions were often such as now seem to us curious. Here is one given in a printed notice issued at Edinburgh in 1714:-- "The Stamp office at Edinburgh in Mr. William Law, Jeweller, his hands, off the Parliament close, down the market stairs, opposite to the Excise office." Here is another old-fashioned address, in which one must admit the spirit of filial regard with which it is inspired:--