Apart from his special duties in large cities, he was authorized by the department to establish the system in all places requiring it: hence in a short time the having letters brought to our very doors, even in the rural districts, will become general. Mr. Briggs goes into the philosophy of the subject: he calculates first the amount of labor a carrier has to perform in the office; secondly, the amount of physical labor required in the performance of his duty as a carrier of letters. Thus the mental and physical are properly inquired into, and their respective duties classified. The result of the latter, as calculated by Mr. Briggs, is as follows:—One hundred and twenty-eight carriers of the Philadelphia office travel daily 2652 miles,—being an average of over twenty-two miles per day each man. _This is no sinecure!_ Apart from this statement, the author of this work called the attention of the agent to an additional item in this calculation; and that was the travelling up several pair of stairs, passing through long corridors and galleries of large public and other buildings, to deliver letters to the several occupants, would make up an additional mile or two to the above statistic of figures. Perhaps one good result will arise from the report which Mr. Briggs has made to the department; and that will be to increase the number of carriers, and add some twenty-five per cent. to their salaries. _A LEAF FROM A SPECIAL AGENT’S NOTE-BOOK._ In the months of April and May, 1861, a large number of registered letters from points in the State of New York, passing through the New York and Philadelphia offices to Egg Harbor City and other places in that section of New Jersey, failed to reach their destination. Before Mr. C. A. Walborn took charge of the office at Philadelphia, the attention of special agent Mr. S. B. Row had been drawn to these losses by the late lamented Mr. James Holbrook, who was the oldest special agent in the employ of the post-office department. In June, Mr. Row went to New York City, and had a consultation with Mr. Holbrook; and, although they differed in opinion as to the precise locality where the trouble probably existed, it was determined to put through some _decoy-letters_. One of these letters “turned up missing,” but, for reasons not necessary to repeat here, nothing was said about it then, but Mr. Row was perfectly satisfied that the abstraction of letters took place in the Philadelphia post-office; and, after an interview with one of the clerks whom he had taken into his confidence, suspicions were directed to Franklin M. Reed. Reed was an old post-office clerk, who, with an intermission of perhaps twelve months, had been in the office for twenty odd years. Efforts were frequently made to “trap” Reed, but none of them succeeded, until, on the evening of the 8th of August, a “decoy” was jointly prepared by Mr. Row and Mr. William M. Ireland, the present chief clerk (1865) of the Philadelphia post-office.