the morning it will be dropped at some little roadside station, whither the mail-cart driver has driven half-a-dozen miles or more to receive it. Thence to the post-office, another half-dozen miles; and here again the familiar process of unpacking, resorting, and re-stamping. Our letter is not for the town at which the bag is opened, but for one of its outlying villages; and the rural postman must be called in before the transaction, commenced in London some ten or twelve hours previously, can be completed. Away he goes, ere yet it is daylight, bag on shoulder, stick in hand, thinking less, probably, of the precious secrets of which he is the bearer, than of his return with a similar, although probably a lighter load in the evening. His life is not exactly one round of pleasure, but an out-and-home sort of journey, in which there is very little real progress, and the 'lettered ease' of which consists in the occasional Sundays on which he is relieved of his burden. He is the final link in the chain which, in the shape of men, horses, steam-engines, has had to be put in motion in order to deliver our penny letter! Letters may be posted at no fewer than twenty-three thousand five hundred receptacles throughout the United Kingdom. How various is the character of these so-called receptacles! Here is the stately post-office of many of our great towns, situated in the very centre of life and activity. There the wayside letter-box, far removed from human habitation and, to all appearance, from human necessity. Lonely roads are no bar to the progress of the rural postman; although the Postmaster-general relates how an attempt to provide postal facilities in a certain district in the west of Ireland was frustrated by a superstitious objection to collect the letters from a wall-box, because 'a ghost went out nightly on parade' in the neighbourhood. Between the stately post-office and the wayside letter-box there are several different kinds of receptacles for letters: there is the branch post-office, an offshoot of the parent establishment; the receiving-house, at which a kind of uncovenanted postal service is carried on; and the pillar letter-box, which is dotted about our great towns almost as plentifully as lamp-posts are. In London there are no fewer than eighteen hundred receptacles for letters, and of these more than eleven hundred are pillar and wall letter-boxes. The public have a peculiar affection for the pillar-box, thinking probably that it can tell no tales. The writer remembers perfectly well seeing a pillar-box thrown down by a passing wagon in one of the streets of London, and afterwards turned with the 'slit' or aperture downward, so that it might not be used until re-erected. But despite this, it was rolled over and several letters inserted in it while it lay prostrate in the gutter! Similarly, letters intended to be 'posted' have often been dropped into the letter-boxes of private firms, and even into the