While, however, submitting to misconception, I sought means to obtain substantial ends; and for this purpose, in preparing a scheme of mutual fines, I added premiums for punctuality, hoping thereby both to obtain the consent of the companies to the plan as a whole, and to supply a new motive to exertion and care. I also planned the conveyance of the mails on one of the principal lines by special trains absolutely limited to mail service, which I hoped to accomplish at a moderate expense by inducing the companies to join in an arrangement under which, the bare additional cost in each instance being ascertained by a neutral authority (some eminent engineer), we should be bound to pay a certain fixed multiple of that amount. Captain Galton, of the Board of Trade, and Sir William Cubitt the eminent engineer, entirely approved of both these plans, the latter estimating the cost in question at from one shilling to one shilling and threepence per mile, and advising that we should offer to pay two-and-a-half times that amount. Under this rule, it may be observed, the Post Office would have to pay less for the whole train than it now frequently pays for only a small part of one. The proposal of mutual fines for unpunctuality, notwithstanding its sweetener of rewards for punctuality, found but little favour with the companies, and the same remark applies to the plan of charge by fixed scale; but the proposed special mail service was ultimately adopted. The introduction of the apparatus for exchanging bags without the stoppage of the train naturally excited considerable attention. Probably, however, many of my readers know little of the process beyond its result. That which takes place is as follows: The bags to be forwarded, being suspended from a projecting arm at the station, are so knocked off by a projection from the train as to fall into a net which is attached to the mail carriage, and is for the moment stretched out to receive them, while, at the same time, the bags to be left behind, being hung out from the mail carriage, are in like manner so struck off as to be caught in a net fixed at the station; the whole of this complex movement being so instantaneous that the uninformed eye cannot follow it. "_April 9th, 1853._--The mail inspector reports that the people on the line of the [recently] accelerated mail assemble in crowds to see the bags exchanged at those stations at which the train does not stop. 'Half Yorkshire,' he says, 'was assembled at Northallerton; but, though very much delighted, the people appear to have had no notion of what was really accomplished. Seeing a set of bags hanging from a sort of lamp-post before the train arrived, and a similar set in a net below after it had passed, their notion was that the use of the machinery was merely to transfer the bags from the one to the other."