Both operations, however, are effected by a projecting apparatus from the flying post-office coming suddenly into contact with that protruding from the post. As fast as the clerks could fill the pigeon-holes before them, the letters were quickly taken therefrom, tied up into a bundle, and then by the guard deposited into the leather bag to which they belonged. On very closely observing the clerks as they worked, we discovered that, instead of sorting their letters into the pigeon-holes according to their superscriptions, they placed them into compartments of their own arrangement, and which were only correctly labelled in their own minds; but as every clerk is held answerable for the accuracy of his assortment, he is very properly allowed to execute it in whatever way may be most convenient to his mind or hand. Besides lame writing and awkward spelling, it was curious to observe what a quantity of irrelevant nonsense is superscribed upon many letters, as if the writer’s object was purposely to conceal from the sorting clerk the only fact he ever cares to ascertain, namely, _the post town_. Their patience and intelligence, however, are really beyond all praise; and although sometimes they stand for eight or ten seconds holding a letter close to their lamp, turning sometimes their head and then it, yet it rarely happens that they fail to decipher it. In opening one bag, a lady’s pasteboard work-box appeared all in shivers. It had been packed in the thinnest description of whitey-brown paper. The clerk spent nearly two minutes in searching among the fragments for the direction, which he at last discovered in very pale ink, written apparently through a microscope with the point of a needle. The letters sorted in the flying post-office are, excepting a few “late letters,” principally cross-post letters, which, although packed into one bag, are for various localities. For instance, at Stafford the mail takes up a bag made up for Birmingham, Wolverhampton and intermediate places, the letters for which, being intermixed, are sorted by the way, and left at the several stations. The bags have also to be stowed away in compartments according to their respective destinations. One lot for Manchester, Liverpool, and Dublin; one for Chester; a bundle of bags for Newcastle-under-Lyne, Market-Drayton, Eccleshall, Stone, Crewe, Rhuabon; a quantity of empty bags to be filled coming back; a lot for Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Carlisle; and one great open bag contained all the letter-bags for Dublin taken upon the road.