“To their Lordships the Postmasters-General. “MY LORDS,-- “The bearer of this, John Peters, is very well known at the General Post Office, and is desirous of becoming a Mail Guard, he is 23 years of age, and we beleive (_sic_) him to be a Sober, Steady Man, and deserving of the Situation. “We are, “My Lords, “Your Lordships’ “Obedient Servts., “CALTHORPE; “RD. SPOONER, Banker, Birmingham; “THOMAS ATTWOOD, Banker, Birmingham.” It was not the salary that made the position of a mail-guard so well worth having. He received only 10s. 6d. a week from the Department, and his uniform of trousers, top-boots, scarlet coat, frogged across the front of the body with gold lace, and a gold-banded black tall hat with a cockade. Out of his miserable half-guinea he had to himself provide the cost of oil for the hand-lamp in front of his seat on the dickey, and to pay the stable-helpers who cleaned his tools and tool-box, oiled and reloaded every day his blunderbuss and pair of pistols, and performed a variety of odd jobs that took live shillings a week out of his pocket. He obviously could not exist on his pay: how, then, did he live? That is a question soon answered. A mail-guard going a long distance--anything from a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles was a usual spell--generally looked for half a crown each from inside passengers and two shillings from the outsides. If you could not afford so much he would do with less, but then you lost the touch of the hat that accompanied the larger sum. A full coach produced 16s. in tips; or, if the trip did not boast so good a waybill, guard and coachman by prescriptive right divided all short fares below 3s. A “good mail”--that is to say, a mail on one of the great direct roads--loading well, would produce sometimes as much as from £300 to £500 a year in tips and fees for services rendered to passengers and others. A guard’s income depended mainly upon his attention and civility to passengers, but there were many other sources. Before 1831 the sale of game was absolutely prohibited, yet a great trade was done in it, with the mail and stage-guards as intermediaries, and there can be no doubt that the coaches afforded every opportunity that poachers could desire of marketing the birds and ground-game that fell to their guns or nets in the darkling midnight woods.