While the ocean mail steamer must be fast and costly, for the better acceleration of correspondence and the accommodation of passengers, she must also go at the appointed hour, whether she is repaired or not, and wholly irrespective of her freight and passenger list. There must be no delays for a lot of freight, or for a company of fifty passengers who have been delayed by the train. She has the mails, and must go at the hour appointed, whatever it may cost the company, and however large a lot of costly stores may have to be thrown away. This punctuality, while it is the means of securing small lots of freight, prevents also the accommodation of the ship's day of sailing to arrangements which might otherwise be profitable. This punctuality in sailing always necessitates large extra expense in repairs. It frequently happens that companies of men work through the nights and on Sundays; getting much increased prices for such untimely labor, and being far less efficient in the night than in the day. If the steamer has had a long passage from whatever causes, she discharges whatever she has and takes in her coal in a hurried and costly way, frequently at fifty per cent. advance on the cost necessary for it if she had ample time. The only means of avoiding these exigencies is by having spare ships, which cost as much as any others, but which add nothing whatsoever to the company's income. It may be safe to say that in every mail company it is necessary to have one spare, and consequently unproductive, ship for every three engaged in active service. This thirty-three per cent. additional outlay would not be necessary except on a mail line, where punctuality was positively demanded. Yet, it is one of the heavy items of expense to be incurred by every company carrying the mails, and with which they can not in any wise dispense, however well their ships may be built. The "Pacific Mail Steamship Company" in running their semi-monthly line from Panama to California and Oregon, keep constantly at their docks eight unemployed steamers and one tow-boat, ready for all exigencies and accidents, and could keep their mails going if nearly their whole moving fleet should be sunk at once. No wonder that they have never missed a single trip, or lost a single passenger by marine accident since they first started in 1850. But there is another class of costs in running ocean steamers, which amount to large sums in the aggregate, and of which the people are generally wholly ignorant. I allude to the items, and what may be called "odds and ends." It is easily imaginable that a company has to pay only the bills for wages, for fuel, and for provisions, and that then the cash-drawer may be locked for the voyage. Indeed, it is difficult for those accustomed to the marine steam service to sit down and enumerate by memory in one day the thousand little treasury leaks, the many wastages, the formidable bill of extras, and the items which