The great extent of the acceleration in the northern mails eventually obtained may be exemplified as follows. When I first took the matter in hand, though there was railway conveyance over the whole distance, a letter leaving London by the night mail for Edinburgh or Glasgow could not receive an answer until the afternoon of the next day but one. The answer to a Monday night's letter, for instance, did not arrive until the afternoon of Wednesday; since the Monday night-mail did not reach its destination until after the departure of the return mail appointed to reach London on Wednesday morning; whereas now (1870)--the Monday night-mail from London reaching Edinburgh or Glasgow on Tuesday morning, and the return mail not starting until Tuesday evening--not only is the answer to a Monday night's letter received on Wednesday morning, but also there is allowed for writing it an interval of not less than ten or eleven hours; in effect, a whole day. This result is easily stated, but were I to attempt to detail the preliminary arrangements essential to the series of changes by which it was effected, or the various devices by which difficulties had to be surmounted, I should weary out the reader and even tire myself. Let it suffice to give some notion of the multiplicity of arrangements affected, and the almost theatrical suddenness of the transition. The day before each successive change everything remained exactly in _statu quo_. Every branch mail along the whole line had to bring up its mail at the established time. Every office, sub-office, receiving-house, and pillar-box, had to yield up its letters in accordance with this arrangement, closing therefore to the public, at such an hour as best suited such requirement. Every rural messenger, on foot or on horseback, had to arrive in accordance with the time for such closing; and, in this case, thousands of receiving places and thousands of messengers were concerned. All this being the proceeding of one day, on the next everything was different, the hour everywhere altered, so much so that, at some of the places remote from the starting point the alteration involved even substitution of day for night or night for day. Of course every person concerned had to be apprised of the change, and prepared for it. A single surveyor might have to issue instructions to a thousand offices, and these to as many messengers, since ignorance or neglect in any member of the force would inevitably have produced confusion fruitful of annoyance and complaint in the places served. It must be added that the highly complicated provision thus made for the mails in one direction had all to be repeated for those in the opposite direction.