The postal employees also showed their strangeness to the new order of things by frequently forgetting to cancel the stamps when the letters bearing them passed through the post—thereby enabling dishonest people to defraud the Department by causing the unobliterated labels to perform another journey. Many correspondents, known and unknown, sent Rowland Hill, in proof of this carelessness, envelopes which bore such stamps. Once a packet bearing four uncancelled stamps reached him. The Mulready envelope had met with the cordial approbation of the artist's fellow Royal Academicians when it was exhibited in Council previous to its official acceptance; though one defect, palpable to any one of fairly discerning ability, had apparently escaped the eighty possibly somnolent eyes belonging to “the Forty”—that among the four winged messengers whom Britannia is sending forth in different directions seven legs only are apportioned. The envelope failed to please the public; it was mercilessly satirised and caricatured, and ridicule eventually drove it out of use. So vast a number of “Mulreadies” remained in stock, however, that, on their withdrawal, a machine had to be constructed to destroy them. There were no philatelists then to come to their rescue. [Illustration: THE MULREADY ENVELOPE.] Forgery of the stamps being out of the question, fraudulent people devoted their energies to getting rid of the red ink used to obliterate the black “pennies” in order to affix these afresh to letters as new stamps. The frauds began soon after the first issue of the adhesives, for by the 21st of May my father was already writing in his diary of the many ingenious tricks which were practised. Cheating the Post Office had so long been an established rule, that even when postage became cheap, and the public shared its benefits impartially—peer and Parliamentarian now being favoured no more highly than any other class—the evil habit did not at once die out. In some cases the fraud was palpable and unabashed. For example, Lord John Russell one day received a sheet of paper, the label on which had been washed so mercilessly that the Queen's features were barely discernible. The difficulty of dealing with the trouble was, of course, intensified by the fact that whereas the stamps were impressed on the paper by powerful machinery, and had had time to dry, the obliterations were made by hand,[171] and were fresh—a circumstance which, in view of the tenacity of thoroughly dried ink, gave a great advantage to the dishonest.