“Less than twenty-five per cent. of advertised letters are delivered. In some of the larger offices the proportion does not exceed fifteen per cent. The payment of two cents for each letter advertised involves a yearly expenditure of about $60,000 for letters returned as dead to the department. Measures have been adopted to reduce the expense, and the advertising is now secured at one-half the rate allowed by law. An obstacle to this economy is found in the law requiring the list of letters to be published in newspapers of largest circulation, which should be repealed, and the mode of advertising left to the discretion of the postmaster-general.” We have stated that imperfect direction is in nine cases out of ten the cause of the miscarriage of letters. We would here suggest to the department the propriety of having competent clerks to superintend this office, so that the letters returned to the writers should not give the same cause of complaint. Many of the clerks so employed make sad havoc of this portion of postal literature, and exercise little or no judgment in their direction of letters to the parties to whom they are returned, or at least for whom they are intended. Name of street and number of house are alike omitted, and thus a letter comes from the dead-letter-office as difficult to decipher or make out as it was when sent thither. Haste in that direction seems to be the chief cause of this display of hieroglyphical knowledge. In the subjoined extracts from a letter which appeared in the “Chicago Journal” (1864) are some practical hints to letter-writers:— “I have just seen a letter of three pages, and not a word in it,—the work of a poor crazed soldier; not a character of any tongue in Babel, but only a little child’s meaningless imitation of writing; and in that letter were ninety dollars. It came here; the department discovered the writer, his regiment, and death. The money waits. Letters sometimes have most interesting histories. Thus, an officer here in Washington writing a letter to his wife, who is in New York, simply signed it with his given name, and carelessly subscribed it ‘Washington.’ The letter came hither; and now who and where was the writer? In the body of the letter was a chance allusion to some brigade: ‘upon this hint’ the department played Othello and ’spake.’ The brigade was inquired after and of, was found, and it answered: the writer was a major, and was dead. His wife had removed from her old desolate home, but she was discovered, and the money placed in her hand as if by the hand of the dead.