As we sat reclining and ruminating in the corner, the scene was as interesting as it was extraordinary. In consequence of the rapid rate at which we were travelling, the bags which were hanging from the thirty brass pegs on the sides of the office had a tremulous motion, which at every jerk of the train was changed for a moment or two into a slight rolling or pendulous movement, like towels, &c., hanging in a cabin at sea. While the guard’s face, besides glistening with perspiration, was--from the labour of stooping and hauling at large letter-bags--as red as his scarlet coat which was hanging before the wall on a little peg, until at last his cheeks appeared as if they were shining at the lamp immediately above them almost as ruddily as the lamp shone upon them--the three clerks were actively moving their right hands in all directions, working vertically with the same dexterity with which compositors in a printing-office horizontally restore their type into the various small compartments to which each letter belongs. Sometimes a clerk was seen to throw into various pigeon-holes a batch of mourning letters, all directed in the same handwriting, and evidently announcing some death; then one or two registered letters wrapped in green covers. For some time another clerk was solely employed in stuffing into bags newspapers for various destinations. Occasionally the guard, leaving his bags, was seen to poke his burly head out of a large window behind him into pitch darkness, enlivened by the occasional passage of bright sparks from the funnel-pipe of the engine, to ascertain by the flashing of the lamps as he passed them, the precise moment of the train clearing certain stations, in order that he might record it in his “time-bill.” Then again a strong smell of burning sealing-wax announced that he was sealing up, and stamping with the Post-office seal, bags three or four of which he then firmly strapped together for delivery. All of a sudden, the flying chamber received a hard sharp blow, which resounded exactly as if a cannon-shot had struck it. This noise, however, merely announced that a station-post we were at that moment passing, but which was already far behind us, had just been safely delivered of four leather letter-bags, which on putting our head out of the window, we saw quietly lying in the far end of a large strong iron-bound sort of landing-net or cradle, which the guard a few minutes before had by a simple movement lowered on purpose to receive them. But not only had we received four bags, but at the same moment, and apparently by the same blow, we had, as we flew by, dropped at the same station three bags which a Post-office authority had been waiting there to receive. The blow that the pendent bag of letters, moving at the rate say of forty miles an hour, receives in being suddenly snatched away, must be rather greater than that which the flying one receives on being suddenly at that rate dropped on the road.