files of laggard boys who have purposely loitered in the hope of a little pleasurable excitement; _two_, and grown men hurry in with their last sacks; _three_, the struggle resembles nothing so much as a pantomimic _mêlée_; _four_, a Babel of tongues vociferating desperately; _five_, final and furious showers of papers, sacks, and bags; and _six_, when all the windows fall like so many swords of Damocles, and the slits close with such a sudden and simultaneous snap, that we naturally suppose it to be a part of the post-office operations that attempts should be made to guillotine a score of hands; and then all is over so far as the outsiders are concerned. “Among the letter-boxes, scenes somewhat similar have been enacted. Letters of every shape and color, and of all weights, have unceasingly poured in; tidings of life and death, hope and despair, success and failure, triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow; letters from friends and notes from lawyers, appeals from children and stern advice from parents, offers from anxious-hearted young gentlemen and ‘first yeses’ or refusals from young maidens, letters containing that snug appointment so long promised you, and ‘little bills’ with requests for immediate payments, ‘together with six-and-eightpence;’ cream-colored missives telling of happy consummations, and black-edged envelopes telling of death and the grave; sober-looking advice notes, doubtless telling when ‘our Mr. Puffwell’ would do himself the honor of calling upon you, and elegant-looking billets, in which business is never mentioned, all jostled each other for a short time; but the stream of gladness and of woe was stopped, at least for one night, when the last stroke of six was heard. The post-office, like a huge monster,—to which one writer has likened it,—has swallowed an enormous meal, and, gorged to the full, it must now commence the process of digestion. While laggard boys, to whom cartoons by one ‘William Hogarth’ should be shown, are muttering, ‘Too late,’ and retiring discomfited, we, having obtained the requisite ‘open sesame,’ will make our way to the interior of the building. Threading our course through several passages, we soon find ourselves among enormous apartments well lit up, where hundreds of human beings are moving about, lifting, shuffling, stamping, and sorting huge piles of letters, and still more enormous piles of newspapers, in what seems at first sight hopeless confusion, but in what is really the most admirable order. In the newspaper-room, men have been engaged not only in emptying the sacks flung in by strong-armed men and weak-legged boys, but also in raking up the single papers into large baskets and conveying them up and down ‘hoists’ into various divisions of the building. Some estimate of the value of these mechanical appliances, moved, of course, by steam-power, may be formed from the fact that hundreds of tons of paper pass up and down these lifts every week. As many of the newspapers