At Witham, on one occasion, the mail was allowed to lie at the stage from ten o'clock at night till six the next morning, "the servants refusing to rise out of their beds to forward it." At times the mail seems to have been intrusted to anyone who could ride a horse. For carelessness in a matter of this kind the postmaster of Sittingbourne was challenged, in July 1675, in the following terms:--"Now have you completed the score of your neglects and miscarriages, in sending the Flanders mail yesterday by a stranger, a Dutchman (without any guide or servant of your own), who suffered it to be broke open on the way, the Secretaries of States' packets and letters to be visited and tore, and many letters lost," etc. About the same time, the postmaster of Rochester offended in a like fashion. "You sent the mail," writes Whitley, "by a seaman last Saturday, who rid alone, thinking he had some gentleman's portmantle behind him; but coming to Dartford, and understanding it to be the mail of letters, he presently swore that if he had known what it had been, he would have cast it into some ditch by the way, for he scorned to be a post-boy." The post-boys employed were not certainly of high character in all cases. In an inquiry respecting the opening of a mail by the way, Whitley writes thus to the postmaster of Colchester:--"I have made inquiry what has become of the Post Boy that formerly lived at Whitechapel, whom you rendered such a notorious rogue, whose father was hanged, and he deserved the same; and I find you have got him to your house, which I much wonder at, you knowing him to be such a wicked villain. I cannot conceive any place to be more likely for such rogueries to be committed than where such are employed." The boys employed were in some cases very young. About delays at Sarum, Whitley writes:--"I am apt to believe the boys that ride are very little, and so discouraged in a dark night, which may be the chief occasion of the slow coming of the mails." Well might the little fellows be discouraged in a midwinter's night, riding through lonely country, along ill-kept roads lying at times under water and full of ruts and stones. Frequent mention is made at this time of the waters being out covering the ways, and one postmaster was desired to provide "able and high horses" in order to secure the forwarding of the mails. In one of Whitley's letters, the road from London to Dover is described as the "best and fairest in England," although, compared with our own fine system of highways, it may have been a very sorry affair. But relatively it carried the palm at the time we are dealing with. The horses supplied for riding the posts were at some places very poor creatures, and in certain cases the postmasters appear not to have had any horses of their own. On the 1st December 1674, the postmaster of Berwick was complained of for not having a horse and boy to carry the mail for Edinburgh, and for having sent it forward to Cockburnspath