But the catalogue is a long one of oversea contracts, and besides there is little variety in the nature of the service. There is an interesting table in the Post Office Guide showing the approximate time taken in the transmission of correspondence from London to certain places abroad. According to this list the longest journey for a letter now figures as 44 days, and that is to the Fiji Islands _via_ Suez, but if you send it by Vancouver the journey is reduced to 30 days. The longest journey without an alternative route is to Hobart, 34 days, but Brisbane and Manila run it very close, 33 and 32 days respectively. Bombay is under 15 days and Cape Town is 17 days. We are practically within a month's touch on paper of the whole civilised world. We have travelled far since the 25th of December 1815, when Charles Lamb wrote to his friend Thomas Manning, who was in China: “Dear old friend and absentee, this is Christmas Day, 1815, with us: what it may be with you I don't know—the 12th of June next year, perhaps.” Lamb's idea was that in writing to a friend it was the day of the receipt of the letter that was the thing to be concerned about, and how difficult it was to be with your friend in imagination six months hence. When your friend was reading your words “all your opinions will be out of date, your jokes obsolete, your puns rejected with fastidiousness as wit of the last age.” But thirty days is a different matter, and even our friends in New Zealand or the Fiji Islands seem only in the next street compared with similar conditions a hundred years ago. At home we grumble at the Post Office, and are irritated at the delay of a single post, but if we are living abroad, or have friends and relations in distant countries, the very word “mail” has a sweet sound in our ear. If we spoke in rhythm, as people sometimes do when labouring under strong emotion, we should say of the Post Office in a foreign land or when parted from our friends, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings.” “The feet” may be a twin screw steamship, but the sight is none the less beautiful. But besides the big foreign services there are a very large number of contracts for conveying mails in British waters. Indeed, to examine the list is to understand in the fullest meaning the term British Isles. When we use the term we think of Great Britain and Ireland, and we perhaps concede the Isle of Man and the Isle of Wight to the group. But there are also the Scilly Islands, the Channel Islands, the Western Isles of Scotland including Skye and the Hebrides, the Arran Islands in Ireland, and the Orkney and Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland.