The General Post-Office, the great heart of the English postal system, is a fine and, now that so many district offices are opened in London, very convenient building. On the ground-floor the different offices attached to the Circulation and Mail departments are located. Upstairs we find the Secretary's department, that of the Receiver and Accountant-General, and other branches of the Circulation Office. Approaching the large hall of the General Post-Office, through one of the three-columned porticoes, we post our letter, and as it is now nearly six o'clock P.M. we stand aside, for a few minutes only, to witness one of the most stirring scenes in the metropolis. Throughout the day, one side of the hall presents a busy enough scene, and its boxes, open for the receipt of correspondence for all parts of the world, are constantly beset with people. Not only do these huge slits still gape for letters, but the large windows, closed through the day, are thrown wide open as a quarter to six chimes from the neighbouring clocks. It is then that an impetuous crowd enters the hall, and letters and newspapers begin to fall in quite a literary hail-storm. The newspaper window, ever yawning for more, is presently surrounded and besieged by an array of boys of all ages and costumes, together with children of a larger growth, who are all alike pushing, heaving, and surging in one great mass. The window, with tremendous gape, is assaulted with showers of papers which fly thicker and faster than the driven snow. Now it is that small boys of eleven and twelve years of age, panting, Sinbad-like, under the weight of huge bundles of newspapers, manage somehow to dart about and make rapid _sorties_ into other ranks of boys, utterly disregarding the cries of the official policemen, who vainly endeavour to reduce the tumult into something like post-office order. If the lads cannot quietly and easily disembogue, they will whiz their missiles of intelligence over other people's heads, now and then sweeping off hats and caps with the force of shot. The gathering every moment increases in number and intensifies in purpose; arms, legs, sacks, baskets, heads, bundles, and woollen comforters--for whoever saw a veritable newspaper-boy without that appendage?--seem to be getting into a state of confusion and disagreeable communism, and "yet the cry is still they come." Heaps of papers of widely-opposed political views are thrown in together; no longer placed carefully in the openings, they are now sent in in sackfuls and basketfuls, while over the heads of the surging crowd were flying back the empty sacks, thrown out of the office by the porters inside. Semi-official legends, with a very strong smack of probability about them, tell of sundry boys being thrown in, seized, emptied, and thrown out again _void_. As six o'clock approaches still nearer and nearer, the turmoil increases more perceptibly, for the intelligent British public is fully alive to the