Another young lady, in this office, prepares an abstract of the circulation issued and returned by national banks, by means of which an immediate answer can be given, when information is asked, as to the outstanding circulation of any particular bank. Another laborious task, performed in this office by a lady, is the preparation of an abstract of the number of notes of each denomination and issue, work requiring great intellectual exactness and care. In the Post Office Department, there are forty-seven women who address “returned letters,” _i. e._, letters which have miscarried, and which are to be returned, if the signature, or anything inside the letter, gives a clue to whom it is to be sent. There are ten women who fold “dead letters,” and three who translate foreign letters. The lady in charge of the women clerks in the Dead-Letter Office, is the daughter of an officer high in rank in the army, now dead. Her grandfather was the President of a New England college. Mrs. Pettigru King, whose father was the Governor of South Carolina, and a member of the United States Senate, herself a woman of remarkable talents, was long employed in the Dead-Letter Office. Sitting among many younger women, her hands flying as swift as any of theirs—the daily task, that of re-directing two hundred letters, usually completed by her before that of any one else—we see a fair, round-faced, blue-eyed woman, whose sudden, bright glance and rapid movements at once fix our attention. She looks to be about fifty; she is in reality over seventy years of age. She and her history combined, probably make as remarkable a fact as the Dead-Letter Office contains. She is the widow of a clergyman. When the war broke out, her only son became hopelessly insane. “As he could not go to the war, I went myself,” she said. As the Assistant-Manager of the United States Sanitary Committee for an entire State, she raised, in money, ten thousand dollars, and collected and distributed ninety thousand hospital articles. She was in the field, in the hospital, and travelling between certain large cities, till the close of the war. Just as she finished her great work, she fell and broke one of her limbs. This confined her to her room for six months. In the meantime, her daughter’s husband died, leaving her with three little children, and no income. Soon after, the mother lost what little she had, and the entire family were left penniless. After an unsuccessful attempt at the widow’s forlorn hope, “keeping boarders,” mother and daughter came to Washington, and sought for positions in the Departments. “Friends tried to dissuade us,” said the old lady. “They told us that we must not come here, to mingle with such people as they thought were in the Departments. We have _not_ seen them. I have been three years in the Post Office Department, and my daughter in the Treasury, and we have met none but respectable women.”