The real business of the Department, however, is performed by post offices, and these are divided into head, sub and branch offices. The head office is the account and controlling office of one or more districts and is in charge of a postmaster, who in large towns ranks as a divisional officer. The sub-office is under the control of a head office for account purposes. It does all kinds of postal work and is always opened where there is a sufficiency of correspondence to justify its existence. The branch office is only intended for villages and places where there is no need of a sub-office. It is really the pioneer of the Department for the purpose of opening up new areas to postal communications. In small places a branch office is put in charge of a schoolmaster, a shopkeeper or any other local resident who has sufficient education to keep the very simple accounts required, and by this means the Post Office is able to give the advantages of its great organization to villages which could never support a departmental office. A still cheaper agency is used for the outlying hamlets, which only receive and send a few letters a week. These are visited periodically by the village or rural postman, who is a kind of perambulating branch office. He delivers letters and money orders, and also receives articles for despatch. He sells stamps and quinine, and being a local man he has to face a certain amount of public opinion if he doesn't act fair and square towards the villagers in his beat. In some hill tracts he is provided with a bugle to announce his arrival, and to the inhabitants of these he brings news of the outside world; he writes their letters and explains to them his own conception of the mysteries of the money order system. But what would be the use of all these offices and all this organization without lines of communication? The chief lines are, of course, the railways, but they form a separate organization and will be discussed in another chapter. For places off the railway there are motor lines and tonga services, such as that sung by Kipling between Kalka and Simla but now a thing of the past owing to the completion of the hill railway. The romance of the Post Office, however, must always lie in the mail runner, or hirkara as he is called in old books on India. The number of tigers sated with his flesh is past count, the Himalayan snows have overwhelmed him, flooded rivers have carried him off and oozy swamps sucked him down. But in the face of all these dangers, has the runner ever failed to do his duty? According to the stories, never, and in real life perhaps not more than once or twice. Is the torrent in spate? He must ford it or swim. Has the rain wrecked the road? He must climb by the cliff. The service admits not a but, nor an if, While the breath's in his mouth, he must bear without fail In the name of the Emperor--the "Overland Mail."--KIPLING.