"HONOURED SIR ... On arriving at Caxton, in the course of conversation with the landlord of the Crown Public-House respecting the loss of the above-mentioned bag, he informed me he had found a mail bag secreted under an oak floor between the joists that supported the floor in one of the upper rooms of his house, and that the letters it contained were of very ancient date, as far back as the year 1702. I requested to be allowed to see them, and, on his producing them, discovered it to be a London bag labelled Tuxford. I desired to be allowed to take two of the letters with me and a bit of the bag, which I gave to Mr. Peacock the solicitor. The only intelligence I could gain as to the probable cause of the bag being found there was that a post-rider was robbed and murdered about the date of the above-mentioned letters." The two letters are still with the official papers. One of them is undecipherable. The other is nearly as legible as on the day it was written. In it the writer announces to his uncle the death of his mother from "the Small Pox and purples," and states that this disease is devastating the town of Kirtlington. The troubles which had long been brewing with the mail-coach contractors now came to a climax. In 1797 an Act of Parliament had been passed imposing a duty of 1d. a mile upon all public carriages. The mail-coach contractors bitterly complained of this impost, and not without reason. A penny a mile was all they received for carrying the mails, and the new statute virtually took this 1d. away, leaving them without any payment at all for their services. It had been overlooked that the mail-coach was not as other coaches were. The ordinary stage-coach was at liberty to carry as many passengers as its proprietor pleased, and it was no unusual thing for eight or nine and even ten to be carried inside, the number outside being limited only by considerations of safety. The mail-coach, on the contrary, was rigidly restricted to five passengers--four inside and one out--and the Post Office rejected all proposals for so altering the construction of the coach as to admit of its carrying more. Then came the year 1799, a year of scarcity, during which all kinds of horse provender reached unprecedented prices. The Government refused to bring in a bill exempting the mail-coaches from the new duty; and it only remained for the Post Office to raise the allowance which the contractors received from 1d. to 2d. a mile, a measure involving an additional payment of £12,000 a year. The second penny, however, was granted only as a temporary allowance, terminable at the end of one year and three-quarters, and, unlike most allowances given under a similar condition, it actually ceased at the appointed time.