She was not a great reader of the newspapers, but persons on her round looked to her as an oracle, and derived information from her as to passing events. Hannah naively says that, as regards Christmas boxes, she fared very well in olden times, but they were not so plentiful in her later years. Hannah, through her devotion to her father when he was alive, and through her assiduous attention to her duties as a humble servant of the Crown, had gained the respect of all those who knew her, both in her native village and on the long round she daily had to traverse. As she served the Post Office throughout her long life (her memory carrying her back to the days when the letters reached Bitton by mail coach and a "single" letter from London cost 10d.), it is gratifying that in her old age, when unable to continue to do her daily round, the Lords of the Treasury, under her exceptional circumstances, granted her half-pay pension, a sum which, with her savings, will serve to maintain her until the end of her days. The writer has had few more pleasurable duties than that which he undertook of presenting Hannah, in her neat and trim cottage, with her first pension warrant. At the celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in the village, the opportunity was taken, in the midst of the festivities, to make a presentation of an elegant marble clock and purse to Miss Brewer. The inscription ran: "Presented during Her Majesty's Diamond Jubilee, together with a purse of money, by the inhabitants of the postal district of Bitton, Gloucestershire, to Miss Hannah Brewer, postwoman, upon her retirement, having served this office from the commencement of Queen Victoria's reign." Even Post Office surveyors are sometimes the subject of little jokes on the part of their subordinates. An assistant surveyor, when testing a rural postman's walk, said that if he had arranged the round originally, he should have taken a shortcut across the fields to a certain little hamlet so as to serve it before instead of after a more distant place, when the postman drily said that he should not have done anything of the kind, as there was a rhine about 18 ft. wide and very deep, which could not well be got over or through, and, turning to the surveyor, he remarked: "Evidently you never were a postman." The humour of this incident lies in the fact that the surveyors have always been drawn from the élite of the Service. A certain imperious surveyor visited a sub-office for the purpose of reprimanding the sub-postmaster for some delinquency, and after soundly rating the individual he addressed, and refusing to hear a single word in explanation, he, when his harangue was over, was coolly informed that he had made a slight mistake, as the circumstance referred to another sub-office altogether.