“The perpetual stir and bustle in this inn,” he plaintively observes, “is as surprising as it is wearisome. Doors opening and shutting, bells ringing, voices calling to the waiter from every quarter, while he cries ‘coming’ to one room, and hurries away to another. Everybody is in a hurry here; either they are going off in the Packets and are hastening their preparations to embark, or they have just arrived and are impatient to be on the road homeward. Every now and then a carriage rattles up to the door with a rapidity which makes the very house shake. The man who cleans the boots is running in one direction, the barber with his powder bag in another. Here goes the barber’s boy with his hot water and razors; there comes the clean linen from the washerwoman, and the hall is full of porters and sailors bringing up luggage, or bearing it away. Now you hear a horn blow because the post is coming in, and in the middle of the night you are awakened by another because it is going out. Nothing is done in England without a noise, and yet noise is the only thing they forget in the bill.” So vivaciously writes Don Manuel of what he saw and heard on his landing in Falmouth, and while it would be futile to deny that his amiable sarcasm about our national propensity for noise contains a grain of truth, yet it may be fairly claimed that the affairs of an establishment so large as that which the Post-Office maintained at Falmouth could not have been conducted with the leisurely and well-bred movements to which Spanish life had accustomed him. There were, when the Don landed at the Market Strand, thirty-nine Packets at Falmouth, of which one sailed every week for Lisbon, one for San Sebastian, or some other port on the north coast of Spain, whence communication with our army in the Peninsula could be maintained, one for the West Indies, sailing alternately by a different route among the islands, and others at somewhat longer intervals for the Mediterranean, Brazil, Surinam, Halifax, and New York. The officers and crews of these Packets formed a body of no less than twelve hundred men, all permanently employed by the Post-Office, while the passengers numbered between two and three thousand in the course of a year.