The Scotch people, as a rule, attain the golden mean, and exhibit the greatest care in such matters. Nor can we wonder at this. The poorer classes are certainly better educated, and whilst seldom profuse on their letters, they are cautious enough not to leave anything of consequence unwritten. The statistics of the Dead Letter Offices of the three countries confirm, to some considerable extent, our rough generalizations. After all, however, the cases of blunder are exceptional; and as no really blind letters are found in the travelling offices, because no letters are posted here, little difficulty is felt, comparatively speaking, and nothing but patience and the Rosetta stone of experience are needed for the performance of the duty. The great majority of letters are like the great majority of people--ordinary, unexceptionable, and mediocre. It could not well be otherwise. In the railway post-office, however, much is learned from the habit of association. The officers, of course, take some degree of interest in the towns on his ride; for, almost domesticated on the rail, he becomes a sort of denizen of those towns he is constantly passing, and sees, or fancies he does, from the letters that arrive from them, a kind of corroboration of all he has settled in his mind with regard to them. Almost every town has its distinctive kind of letters. That town we just passed is manufacturing, and the letters are almost entirely confined to sober-looking advice-cards, circulars, prices current, and invoices, generally very similar in kind and appearance, in good-sized envelopes, with very plainly written or printed addresses. Now and then a lawyer's letter, written in a painfully distinct hand, or a thick, fat, banker's letter, groaning under the weight of bills and notes, escapes from company such as we have described; but still the letters sustain the town's real character. Now we are at an old country town, with quiet-going people, living as their fathers did before them, and inheriting not only their money and lands, but their most cherished principles: their letters are just as we expected, little, quiet, old-fashioned-looking things, remarkable for nothing so much as their fewness. _Now_ we are among the coal-districts, and almost all the letters have a smudged appearance, making you imagine that they must have been written by the light of pit-candles, in some region of carbon "two hundred fathoms down." _This_ bag comes from a sea-bathing place, and so long as summer continues, will unmistakably remind you of sea-shore, sea-sand, and sea-anemones. _These_ bags have previously had to cross a broad sea ferry, and the letters tell of salt water as certainly as if they were so many fishes. Another twenty miles, and we come to an old cathedral town with its letters looking as orthodox as any Convocation could wish; whilst that other town is clearly a resort of fashion, if we may judge from the finely scented, perfumed,