Not only do the writers of letters feel a difficulty in sending their manuscript across the sea, but people appear to have a sense of difficulty in correspondence proportionate to the distance the letter will have to traverse. One would infer that they really experience, by the power of imagination, a feeling of fatigue in sending a letter on a long journey. If this is not so, how are we to account for the fact that the rarity of letters from friends increases in exact proportion to our remoteness from them? A simple person without correspondence would naturally imagine that it would be resorted to as a solace for separation, and that the greater the distance the more the separated friends would desire to be drawn together occasionally by its means, but in practice this rarely happens. People will communicate by letter across a space of a hundred miles when they will not across a thousand. The very smallest impediments are of importance when the desire for intercourse is languid. The cost of postage to colonies and to countries within the postal union is trifling, but still it is heavier than the cost of internal postage, and it may be unconsciously felt as an impediment. Another slight impediment is that the answer to a letter sent to a great distance cannot arrive next day, so that he who writes in hope of an answer is like a trader who cannot expect an immediate return for an investment. To prevent friendships from dying out entirely through distance, the French have a custom which seems, but is not, an empty form. On or about New Year's Day they send cards to _all_ friends and many acquaintances, however far away. The useful effects of this custom are the following:-- 1. It acquaints you with the fact that your friend is still alive,--pleasing information if you care to see him again. 2. It shows you that he has not forgotten you. 3. It gives you his present address. 4. In case of marriage, you receive his wife's card along with his own; and if he is dead you receive no card at all, which is at least a negative intimation.[32] This custom has also an effect upon written correspondence, as the printed card affords the opportunity of writing a letter, when, without the address, the letter might not be written. When the address is well known the card often suggests the idea of writing. When warm friends send visiting-cards they often add a few words of manuscript on the card itself, expressing friendly sentiments and giving a scrap of brief but welcome news. Here is a suggestion to a generation that thinks friendly letter-writing irksome. With a view to the sparing of time and trouble, which is the great object of modern life (sparing, that is, in order to waste in other ways), cards might be printed as forms of invitation are, leaving only a few blanks to be filled up; or there might be a public signal-book in which the phrases most likely to be useful might be represented by numbers.