"Come, send round the liquor, and fill to the brim A bumper to Railroads, the Press, Gas, and Steam; To rags, bags, and nutgalls, ink, paper, and quill, The Post, and the Postman, the gude Roland Hill! By steam we noo travel mair quick than the eagle, A sixty mile trip for the price o' a sang! A prin it has powntit--th' Atlantic surmountit, We'll compass the globe in a fortnight or lang. The gas bleezes brightly, you witness it nightly, Our ancestors lived unca lang in the dark; Their wisdom was folly, their sense melancholy When compared wi' sic wonderfu' modern wark. Neist o' rags, bags, and size then, let no one despise them, Without them whar wad a' our paper come frae? The dark flood o' ink too, I'm given to think too, Could as ill be wanted at this time o' day. The Quill is a queer thing, a cheap and a dear thing, A weak-lookin' object, but gude kens how strang, Sometimes it is ceevil, sometimes it's the deevil. Tak tent when you touch it, you haudna it wrang. The Press I'll next mention, a noble invention, The great mental cook with resources so vast; It spreads on bright pages the knowledge o' ages, And tells to the future the things of the past. Hech, sirs! but its awfu' (but ne'er mind it's lawfu') To saddle the Postman wi' sic meikle bags; Wi' epistles and sonnets, love billets and groan-ets, Ye'll tear the poor Postie to shivers and rags. Noo Jock sends to Jenny, it costs but ae penny, A screed that has near broke the Dictionar's back, Fu' o' dove-in and dear-in, and _thoughts_ on the shearin'!! Nae need noo o' whisp'rin' ayont a wheat stack. Auld drivers were lazy, their mail-coaches crazy, At ilk public-house they stopt for a gill; But noo at the gallop, cheap mail-bags maun wallop. Hurrah for our Postman, the great Roland Hill. "Then send round the liquor," etc. The advantages resulting from a rapid and cheap carriage of letters must readily occur to any ordinary mind; but perhaps the following would hardly suggest itself as one of those advantages. Dean Alford thus wrote about the usefulness of post-cards, introduced on the 1st October 1870: "You will also find a new era in postage begun. The halfpenny cards have become a great institution. Some of us make large use of them to write short Latin epistles on, and are brushing up our Cicero and Pliny for that purpose." Unlike some of the branches of post-office work, other than the distribution of news, either by letter or newspaper, the money order system dates from long before the introduction of penny postage--namely from the year 1792.