During the war, tens of thousands of photographs were thus sent astray. The husband, the father, the brother, the son, under whose name they came—alas! when they reached his regiment, he was not—the heaped-up trench, the unknown grave, the unburied dead—somewhere amid them all—he slept, and the memento of the love that lived for him, came back to this receptacle of the nation, and here it is! On a stand near the window, is an immense open book lined with photographs, all the photographs of soldiers. With a tender hand, the Government gathered these pictures of its lost and unknown sons and garnered them here, for the sake of the living, who might seek their lost. Turning over the pages, we see many empty spaces, and find that friends coming here and turning over the pages of this book have identified the faces of loved ones who perished in the war. Many of these are photographs of a poor character, (whose transient chemicals are already fading out,) which were taken on the field, and sent, by soldiers, home to mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts. The chances of war are sufficient to account for their going astray of their objects and for their return here—where more than one tear-blinded woman has sought and found them, at last. To return to the dryer details of the Dead-Letter Office, we find that all letters held for postage, all blank, unmailable, and hotel letters pass through a like process with the dead-letter, with the exception of the unmailable letters, which come directly from the office with written lists, which are checked to see if the letters are all with the lists. These the opener counter-checks, marking the contents both on letter and list, to show that it was received and doubly opened. These lists, with their letters, are sent to the Return Branch. Here they are returned to their writers, and their lists are made to show the disposition of every letter. These lists are carefully filed and subject to re-perusal. The Return Branch, which is composed entirely of ladies, sends average dead-letters back to their writers at the rate of seven thousand a day. In this branch we find the application-clerk whose duty it is to trace letters, and to send such information to persons applying for letters as the records may show. In case of the loss of a valuable letter, the Department spares no pains in its efforts to trace and find it. The Postmaster-General, in one of his recent reports, says of this branch of the Postal Service: