Over these routes the courier travelled twice each way weekly. Between Fredericton and Chatham, there was a service of the same frequency. Chatham was the distributing point for the line of settlements, skirting the shore, northward to Campbellton, and southward to Dorchester. On the former route, the trips were made weekly, and on the latter, twice a week. Mails were carried daily between Fredericton and Woodstock, Fredericton and St. John and St. John and St. Andrews. Though, in comparison with the other provinces, the mail conveyance in New Brunswick was not greatly open to criticism in point of frequency, the post office was no more popular there than elsewhere. Steamers, which ran daily between St. John and Fredericton, were employed by the post office to carry the mails, but though the steamer carried many every trip, there were few of which the post office got the benefit. There was a practice of taking letters to the steamer and tossing them on to the table in the cabin. On the arrival of the steamer in port, a crowd of messenger boys who were awaiting it picked up the letters from the table and delivered them through the town at one penny or twopence each. The stage coaches were laid under contribution in the same irregular manner. Every passenger between St. John and Fredericton was expected to take with him all his friends' letters, which he either delivered to the persons to whom they were addressed, or deposited in the post office, the postmaster receiving a penny each for delivering them. A stratagem sometimes employed was to place letters in the midst of a bundle of paper and sticks of wood, the freight of the bundle being less than the postage on the letters it contained. It was at this time that the legislature of New Brunswick began to manifest an interest in the management of the post office. In 1841, a special committee of the assembly reviewed the operation of the system, and among the questions discussed was the authority. The committee expressed the opinion that no arrangement could be satisfactory which did not combine provincial control of the local post office with a general imperial oversight over the whole system; and they recommended that a deputy postmaster general should be appointed whose duty it should be to prescribe mail routes, open post offices, appoint postmasters, and generally to manage the business of the post office in the province.[277] The question of local management the general post office proposed to solve, not in the manner desired by the assembly, but by separating New Brunswick from the jurisdiction of the deputy postmaster general at Halifax, and establishing a department in the province, under a deputy postmaster general who should be stationed at St. John, and who should be, as the deputies in the other provinces were, subject to the postmaster general of England.