It is found that great public ceremonies affect the weekly returns of the number of letters passing through the post. Sometimes the result is a perceptible increase; at other times a decrease. The funeral of the great Duke of Wellington was held on the 18th November 1852, and “all London” was in the streets to look at it. The weekly return, published on the 22nd, showed that the number of letters dispatched by the evening mail from the metropolis on that memorable 18th fell off by about 100,000. The next day's letters were probably increased by an extra 10,000. The revolutionary year, 1848, also had a deteriorating influence on correspondence, the return published in 1849 for the previous twelvemonths showing a smaller increase than, under ordinary circumstances, might have been expected. In 1853 Docker's ingenious apparatus for the exchange of mail-bags at those railway stations through which trains pass without stopping was introduced. The process is described by the postal reformer as follows:—“The bags to be forwarded, being suspended from a projecting arm at the station, are so knocked off by a projection from the train as to fall into a net which is attached to the mail carriage, and is for the moment stretched out to receive them; while, at the same time, the bags to be left behind, being hung out from the mail carriage, are in like manner so struck off as to be caught in a net fixed at the station; the whole of this complex movement being so instantaneous that the uninformed eye cannot follow it.” It was this inability to understand the movement which led to a ridiculous error. On the first day of the experiment people assembled in crowds to witness it. At Northallerton “half Yorkshire” gathered—according to the mail inspector—and many were under the impression that the outgoing set of bags they saw hanging to the projecting arm in readiness for absorption by the passing train, and the incoming set hanging out from the mail carriage, ready to be caught in the net fixed at the station, were one and the same thing. Though what useful purpose could be served by the mere “giving a lift” of a hundred yards or so to one solitary set of bags is rather hard to perceive. [Illustration: By permission of the Proprietors of the “_City Press_.” AN EARLY TRAVELLING POST OFFICE WITH MAIL BAGS EXCHANGE APPARATUS.]