inclosed box being recommended to our care by His Grace the Duke of Queensberry, one of Her Majesty's principall Secretarys of State, we do send the same by a flying pacquet.... You are to send us advice by the first post of the safe comeing of this pacquet to your hands." In short, flying packet, in its original sense, appears to have meant simply a packet of which the enclosures were designed for some other person than the one whose address the packet bore. Within the Post Office it is occasionally necessary to employ technical terms which would not be intelligible to persons without; but this, so far as we are aware, is the only instance of the same term being used within and without in two totally different senses. [16] 1661. Feb. 3rd. Robert Reade to Charles Spellman. "Att the right honourable my Lord Townshend's in the Old Palace Yard, Westminster." The writer says that he has as yet received no command from Mr. Spellman or from Lord Townshend, "nor do I wonder at it, because the flying post lay drunke last Friday at Fakenham (being the day that he should have binn at Thetford to take those letters then there which he should bring hether on Saterday), and had not changed his quarter yesterday as I am informed by one of Scott's men who saw him pittyfully drunke. The cuntry complaines of him."--Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eleventh Report, Appendix, Part iv. p. 25. Of the state of the roads about this period the Highway Act 1691 affords, perhaps, not the least trustworthy evidence. To incidents which have resulted in nothing more than temporary inconvenience travellers are apt to give a touch of humorous exaggeration. An Act of Parliament, on the contrary, deals with facts as they are, and concerns itself not with imaginary ills. What, then, is to be thought of the condition of the roads when provisions such as these were necessary?--No causeway for horses was to be less than three feet in breadth, nor was the breadth of any cartway leading to a market town to be less than eight feet. In highways of less breadth than twenty feet no tree was to be permitted to grow, or stone, timber, or manure to be heaped up so as to obstruct progress; and hedges were to be kept trimmed, and boughs to be lopped off, so as to allow a free passage to travellers, and not to intercept the action of the sun and wind. Of any breach of these and other provisions the road-surveyor was, on the Sunday next after it became known to him, to give public notice in the parish church immediately after the conclusion of the sermon.