However, as the Sunday duty was now permanently off my hands, I had leisure to direct my attention towards those measures for diminishing its amount, which formed an integral part of my plan. One of these was so to arrange the work as to have the greatest practicable amount of sorting done in the travelling offices on the railways; the earlier portion ending by five on Sunday morning, and the latter not beginning till nine on Sunday evening. The pursuit of this object led to a singular device. One portion of the correspondence passing through London on the Sunday, viz., that from towns too near to London to allow of time for sorting on the way, seemed incapable of being brought within this arrangement; but while I was preparing a minute on the subject, in which my brother Arthur was assisting me, I suddenly startled him, so he now reports, by exclaiming: "A light breaks in upon me." I had just conceived the first notion of the device referred to above, which, strange as it may seem, really answers its purpose very well. This was that the _down_ mail-trains on Saturday night should take up these letters at the different towns on their respective routes, thus conveying them, in the first instance, in a direction opposite to their final destination, but subsequently transferring them to the up-trains for conveyance to town. Thus the down night train to Liverpool would receive successively the up-mails of St. Albans and Watford, and on arrival at a more remote town would transfer them all to the up-train, which would carry them back to London. By this arrangement the required opportunity for sorting the letters was obtained. Indirect as is the route, no time whatever is lost to the public, which to this day, I believe, remains quite unaware that letters are carried away from London by one night train only to be brought back by another. Another point for relief was a Sunday morning delivery in the suburbs of London, employing about four hundred men, against which, amidst all the hubbub of the time, not a word had been said.[67] It occurred to me that, as a means of immediately reducing the work, the district cross posts might be dispensed with on Sundays, which could be done without inconvenience.