At first the facilities for mail services were very limited. Postmaster-General Kendall, in 1835, suggested that the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company might be asked to close in some portion of their baggage-cars, a strong lock being placed on the apartment, to which only the postmasters at Washington and Baltimore should have keys. In the same report he adds: "If wheels can be constructed which can be used alike upon the railroads and the streets of the cities respectively, the Department will furnish an entire car containing the mail to be delivered at one depot, and received at the other, asking nothing of the company but to haul it." It was even proposed at this time that the Government should have its own locomotives, everything else on the road giving the right of way to the mail train. This proposition was not adopted. The fear was expressed, however, that if the Department did not have absolute control over the road, the people would have to depend on stage or other horse transportation for mail service. All these early troubles in time passed away, and, through concessions on both sides, the railways soon became the most important agent of the Post-Office Department. [Illustration: Mail Carrying in the Country.] This, of course, was not accomplished without many trials and tribulations. It seems strange, in the light of the present, to read in an official report a remonstrance from route agents that nearly every night dead bodies were placed in the mail crates between Philadelphia and New York, and the mails packed around the coffins. This breach of good order disappeared after that time, and with it came to an end the freight methods and the old stage-coach ideas of dealing with the mails. A separate compartment in a baggage-car, fitted up with few conveniences necessary for the distribution of local way-mail, was the beginning of the system which has developed into the luxurious postal cars of the present time. As a matter of history, however, it is only fair to say that the system which we then adopted had been in use for some time by our northern neighbors of Canada, who had taken it from the mother country.