While the Government and others still cherished the delusion that the recipient of a letter would feel insulted if denied the time-honoured privilege of paying for it, the delayed publication of the stamps was less to be regretted since it enabled the experiment to be first tried with money only. The official forecast was at fault. From the very start, and with the best will in the world, the public, when posting letters, put down pennies and missives together, and when the stamps—called by would-be wits the “Government sticking-plasters”—at last appeared, the difficulty was not to persuade people to make use of them, but to get them supplied fast enough to meet the popular demand. While the stamps were still new that large section of mankind which never reads public instructions was occasionally at a loss where to affix the adhesive. Any corner of the envelope but the right one would be chosen, or, not infrequently, the place at the back partly occupied by the old-fashioned seal or wafer. Even the most painstaking of people were sometimes puzzled, and a certain artist, accustomed, like all his brethren of the brush, to consider that portion of his canvas the right hand which faced his left, was so perplexed that he carried to the nearest post office his letter and stamp, knocked up the clerk, and when the latter's face appeared at the little unglazed window of the ugly wooden screen which is now superseded everywhere, perhaps save at railway booking offices, by the more civilised open network, asked politely, “Which do you call the right hand of a letter?” “ We've no time here for stupid jokes,” was the surly answer, and the window shut again directly. A similar rebuff was administered to a man who, while travelling, called for letters at the post office of a provincial town. He was the unfortunate possessor of an “impossible” patronymic. “What name?” demanded the supercilious clerk. “Snooks,” replied the applicant; and down went the window panel with a bang, accompanied by a forcibly expressed injunction not to bother a busy man with idiotic jests. To the post office of, at that time, tiny Ambleside, came one day a well-to-do man to buy a stamp to put on the letter he was about to post. “Is this new reform going to last?” he asked the postmaster. “Certainly,” was the reply; “it is quite established.” “Oh, well, then,” said the man, resolved to give the thing generous support, “give me _three_ stamps!” Not much of a story to tell, perhaps, but significant of the small amount of letter-writing which in pre-penny postage days went on even among those well-to-do people who were not lucky enough to enjoy the franking privilege.