Receiving an affirmative answer, I requested him to call her, taking care that they should hold no private conversation. Exhibiting to her the outside of the letter, I asked if she recollected taking it from the mail and placing it in the post master's box. They exchanged glances, and, on the second look towards him, I was just in time to observe a trifling nod of the head by way of intimating that she had better say yes. But she thought otherwise, and was quite positive that if such a thing bad come loose in the bag, at any time when she opened the mail, she would have noticed it. "To come right to the point," said I, "this document is disowned by the Department, and no authority has been given to any one to discontinue the other office." A forced laugh from the post master followed this announcement, but the honest wife looked worried. "Well," he answered, "if it did not come from the Appointment Office, then some mischievous clerk in the Department may have sent it as an April-fool hoax, as it was near the first of April; or some one may have slipped it into my private box unobserved, though no one could well do it unless it was the boy that you see about here." "I see no motive that he could have had for doing it," I observed. "But he might possibly have been hired to do it," was the reply. In accounting for the envelope, it now became an important point to settle whether or not the post master had been in the habit of preserving all official circulars from the Department. If so, and this envelope had been torn from one of them, the remaining fragment might still come to light as his certain accuser. A search of the files showed the preservation of all such documents for two years previous, but nothing appeared to match the covering of the "order." Still believing it was obtained in that way, I adjourned the investigation for a few days, and meantime applied to the Department for duplicates of any printed circulars that had been sent to this office, and the return mail brought me one that was so sent, but a few weeks previous to the fraud in question. Its absence from the postmaster's files, while all other similar documents had been carefully saved, was a strong circumstance to show that a part of it at least had been used for this dishonest purpose. But the damning proof was yet to come. In the printed words "Official Business," which were in capitals on the outside of the duplicate circular, there was a defect, or "nick" in the letter O, and the last S, in business. On comparing this with the covering of the spurious order, exactly the same bruises were found in the same letters, identifying the one with the other in the most positive manner, as the coincidence would be almost miraculous of the same type being battered in precisely the same way, upon circulars printed at different times.