This Dead Letter Office is one of the most complicated pieces of machinery in the "ship of state." I will try to explain and elucidate as much of it as came under my observation. Letters left "uncalled for" at the different post-offices throughout the country are sent to the Dead Letter Office, after a certain length of time. Letters not prepaid, or short-paid, through neglect or ignorance of the writer, also find their way here; and so do foreign letters, from all parts of Europe, which have been prepaid only in part, and therefore come here, instead of reaching their destination. Sometimes mails are robbed, and the mail-bags hidden or thrown away, but are afterwards searched for, and their remaining contents brought to this office. Then again, a vessel at sea, homeward-bound, brings letters from ships meeting it, of sailors and passengers, who send their letters in firm faith that they will reach their anxious friends at home; but if our Government happens to have no treaty or contract with that particular government to which the writer belongs, of course, the letters cannot be forwarded, but are laid at rest here. These letters are carefully preserved for a number of years. They are sometimes called for, and found, a long, long time after they were written; in fact, only "dead" letters are destroyed. Though I wish to speak more particularly of the duties and labor performed by the ladies employed in this department, I must begin by saying that all letters pass through the hands of, and are opened by, a number of gentlemen--clerks in the department--whose room is on the ground floor of the building. A great number of letters contain money, valuable papers, and postage stamps. These are sent to the superintendent's room. Letters without contents are folded, with the envelope laid inside the letter, tied in bundles, and sent up-stairs for directing. Money, drafts, and postage-stamps, however, are not the only articles considered "mailable matter" by the public. One day I looked over a box filled with such matter, taken from dead letters and parcels in the opening room, and found in it one half-worn gaiter boot, two hair-nets, a rag doll-baby, minus the head and one foot, a set of cheap jewelry, a small-sized frying-pan, two ambrotypes, one pair of white kid gloves, a nursing-bottle, a tooth-brush, a boot-jack, three yards of lace, a box of Ayer's pills, a bunch of keys, six nutmegs, a toddy-stick, and no end of dress samples. This matter is allowed to accumulate for three months, and is then sold at auction; but a register is so carefully kept, that the person mailing the doll-baby without prepaying can follow its progress from the little country town where it was mailed to the end of its career under the hammer at the Dead Letter Office, and here can claim the amount it brought at auction.