[123] During a part of Cobden's Parliamentary career and that of his and our friends, J. B. Smith and Sir Joshua Walmsley, all three men were next-door neighbours, living in London in three adjoining houses. Hence Nos. 101, 103, and 105 Westbourne Terrace came to be known as “Radical Row.” [124] “The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago,” p. 24. [125] Losses, for example, are often imputed to the Post Office for which it is entirely blameless. Did space allow, scores of instances might be cited. One of the most absurd was the case of a London merchant, who, in the course of very many months, wrote at intervals angry letters to the Postmaster-General asking why such or such a letter had not reached its destination. No amount of enquiries could trace the errant missives; and the luckless Department was, at corresponding intervals, denounced for its stupidity in equally angry letters to the Press. One day, while certain city improvements were being carried out, an ancient pump, near the merchant's office, which had long refused to yield any water was taken down, when its interior presented an unusual appearance. An errand-boy had, at odd times, been sent to post the Firm's letters, and had slipped them into the narrow slit where once the vanished pump-handle used to work. The introduction of street letter-boxes was then recent, and their aspect still unfamiliar. The boy had therefore taken the venerable relic for one of those novel structures, and all the missing letters lay therein. CHAPTER V AT THE TREASURY To any one disposed to belief in omens it would seem that the beginning of Rowland Hill's connection with the Treasury augured ill for its continuance. Even the letter which invited him to office went near to miss reaching its destination. He had left town for a brief rest after the strenuous work of the close upon three years' struggle for postal reform, leaving strict orders at the South Australian Office that if any communication from the Government intended for him arrived there it should be forwarded without delay. The document did arrive, but was laid aside to await the wanderer's return because it bore in the left-hand corner what seemed to be the signature of a then well-known man connected with Australian affairs who, at the meetings of the Association, was much given to bestow on its members much unsought advice and worthless criticism; and was therefore, by unanimous consent, voted an insufferable bore. However, when a messenger came from the Treasury to ask why no notice had been taken of a letter from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the alarmed clerk on duty hastened to send on the belated dispatch, wrapped up as a brown paper parcel, by railway, as being, to his mind, the most expeditious, apparently because most novel mode of conveyance. But parcels by rail made slower progress in those days than in these; and when at last this one reached its destination its date was hardly of the newest. [Illustration: