"During the advent year of penny postage, the commission on Post Office orders was reduced to threepence and sixpence for sums not exceeding two pounds and not exceeding five pounds respectively. In that year the number of orders granted in the United Kingdom was (in round numbers, which we shall use throughout, for the reader's greater convenience) 188,000, for an aggregate amount of £313,000. Even this was a great advance on the business previously done at the old prices; but what are the figures for the tenth year of penny postage? During the year 1850 the number of orders granted in the United Kingdom was 4,440,000, for amounts making up £8,495,000; only a million less than the yearly produce of the income and assessed taxes put together! This marvellous increase can perhaps be better appreciated by being seen through a diminished medium. In the first _month_ of the penny postage (1840), the issue of orders was about 10,000 in number, for something over £16,000; but in the month of December, 1851, the number of orders issued was more than 367,000, for £690,000. That is to say, during that single month twice as many orders were taken out and paid for than were issued and paid in 1840 during the whole year. * * * * * "The Central Money Order Office in which these remarkable results have been produced and ascertained is in Aldersgate Street, London, hard by the Post Office. It is a large establishment--large enough to be a very considerable post office in itself--with extensive cellarage branching off into interminable groves of letters of advice and receipts, all methodically arranged for reference. The room in which the orders are issued and paid has a flavour of Lombard Street and money. It has its long banker's counter, where clerks sit behind iron gratings, with their wooden bowls of cash, and their little scales for weighing gold; and vistas of pigeon-holes stretch out behind them--which are not without their pigeons, as we shall presently see. Here, from ten o'clock to four, keeping the swing doors on the swing all day, all sorts and conditions of people come and go. Greasy butchers and salesmen from Newgate Market, with bits of suet in their hair, who loll, and lounge, and cool their foreheads against the grating, like a good-humoured sort of bears; sharp little clerks not long from school, who have everything requisite and necessary in readiness; older clerks in shooting coats, a little sobered down as to official zeal, though possibly not yet as to cigar divans and betting offices; matrons who _will_ go distractedly wrong, and whom no consideration, human or divine, will induce to declare in plain words what they have come for; people with small children, which they perch on edges of remote desks, where the