“When the letters have been stamped, and those insufficiently paid picked out, they are carried away to undergo the process of sorting. In this operation they are very rapidly divided into ‘roads,’ representing a line of large towns: thus, letters for Derby, Loughborough, Nottingham, Lincoln, etc., might be placed in companionship with one division or ‘road,’ and Bilston, Wednesbury, Walsall, West Bromwich, etc., in another.” As we have stated, the immense amount of business transacted in the post-offices of large cities is not unfrequently lost sight of,—business transactions of a nature that few understand or comprehend, and which exercise an influence on men and nations equally as powerful as that of the press. Few persons are acquainted with the inner arrangements of a post-office. Let any one glance into it as he passes, and he will be struck with the vast pile of mail-matter constantly arriving and departing, as well as the number of hands engaged in their arranging and distributing. Forty mails arrive and depart in the twenty-four hours,—making over three hundred pouches, besides canvas bags containing newspapers, &c.: these are estimated more by bulk than numbers. Mind, intellect, strength, quickness of action and of thought, are all required here, _and found_. Without this, confusion worse confounded would ensue, and the pulsation of this little world would cease to throb. A post-office is a little world: it is peopled with the thoughts of men that go and come, pass and repass, move on afar and away over land and water to other cities, and return again,—some oppressed, some elated: “so runs the world away!” What is the romance of a post-office but its reality? It is a history of letters. Peep into their contents, and you read a volume far surpassing the wildest flights of the imagination. And yet they are as a sealed book to all except those to whom they are directed. Yet you can read it in the action of the recipients, trace its effects, the moral is there. Glance at the ladies’ window: see that tall female, upon whose face you can trace the dark lines of sorrow. Day after day has she called, asking in a trembling voice for a letter. She had told the clerk a sad story of an absent son,—told it for the purpose of explaining the cause of her frequent visits. Did she but know that beneath a blasted tree, scathed by the lightning flash of a thousand rebel muskets, he lies buried,—deep, deep down in the cold ground, with hundreds of others, both friends and foes, who fell there in bloody strife. But when the startling news did come, her tall form was seen no more at that window. She was alone in the world! Watch that window: it is an index to a volume of life. Not alone the broken-hearted and the sorrowing, not alone the forsaken wife and the expectant maiden, not alone the anxious mother, but the gay, the frivolous, the abandoned, all flock here; for all are mixed up in the great struggle of life.