minutes, the signal-bell announced first the approach and then the arrival of “the down London mail.” As soon as this train, which we had been awaiting, stopped, the door of the Flying Post-office was opened, and the bags which had been lying on the platform were no sooner packed either into it or into its tender behind, than, the engine-driver’s whistle announcing the departure of the train, we without delay presented an order which we had obtained to travel in the post-office from Stafford to Crewe, and we were scarcely seated in a corner on some letter-bags to witness the operations of its inmates, when the train started and away we went! _The flying Post-office._ This office, which every evening flies away from London to Glasgow, and wherein Government clerks are busily employed in receiving, delivering, and sorting letters all the way, is a narrow carpeted room, twenty-one feet in length by about seven in breadth, lighted by four large reflecting lamps inserted in the roof, and by another in a corner for the guard. Along about two-thirds of the length of this chamber there is affixed to the side wall a narrow table, or counter, covered with green cloth, beneath which various letter bags are stowed away, and above which the space up to the roof is divided into six shelves fourteen feet in length, each containing thirty-five pigeon-holes of about the size of the little compartments in a dove-cote. At this table, and immediately fronting these pigeon-holes, there were standing as we flew along, three Post-office clerks intently occupied in convulsively snatching up from the green-cloth counter, and in dexterously inserting into the various pigeon-holes, a mass of letters which lay before them, and which, when exhausted, were instantly replaced from bags which the senior clerk cut open, and which the guard who had presented them then shook out for assortment. On the right of the chief clerk the remaining one-third of the carriage was filled nearly to the roof with letter-bags of all sorts and sizes, and which an able-bodied Post-office guard, dressed in his shirt-sleeves and laced waistcoat, was hauling at and adjusting according to their respective brass-labels. At this laborious occupation the clerks continue standing for about four hours and a half; that is to say, the first set sort letters from London to Tamworth, the second from Tamworth to Preston, the third from Preston to Carlisle, and the fourth letters from Carlisle to Glasgow. The clerks employed in this duty do not permanently reside at any of the above stations, but are usually removed from one to the other every three months.