The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and RomanceHyde, James Wilson
History
The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance
Hyde, James Wilson
Postal service -- Great Britain
proceedings were but a plot of a school-girl to get home; and the young
lady afterwards confessed this to be the case.
It is not probable that the petty fraud of again using stamps which have
already passed through the post is perpetrated with any great frequency
upon the Post-office. Still, cases no doubt do occur, and may at any
time lead to criminal proceedings, like those which took place at Hull
some years ago. A person in that town having posted a letter with an old
stamp affixed, the stamper who had to deface the stamp in the usual
way, detected the irregularity, and brought the matter under notice.
Proceedings were taken against the offender, and the case being
established against him, and the fact being stated that this person had
previously been warned by the Post-office against committing like
frauds, he was mulcted in a fine of £5 and costs, with the alternative
punishment of three-months' imprisonment.
The accidents and misfortunes which are the lot of letters in this
country, seem also to attend post-letters in their progress through the
Post-offices of other countries. A curious case was noticed some years
ago in the French capital. Some alterations were being carried out in
the General Post-office in Paris, when there was found, in a panel
situated near a letter-box, a letter which had been posted just fifty
years before. There it had remained concealed half a century. The letter
was forwarded to the person whose address it bore, and who, strange to
say, was still alive; but the writer, it transpired, had been dead many
years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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