This is again six o’clock p.m., but not by any means on the same evening. The occasion could have no possible connection with going out to dinner, for it happens to be six o’clock “sharp:” and, moreover, it is on Friday, a day on which it is supposed to be as unlucky to go out to dinner as to go to sea, to marry, to put on a new coat, to commence a new novel, to cut your nails, or buy tripe. Now, what can I be doing in the city on this Friday evening? Certainly not to perform any of the operations alluded to above. Scarcely on business. Bank, Exchange, wharfs, Custom-house, money-market, merchants’ counting-houses, are all closed, and the inner city, the narrow winding lanes, that almost smell of money, are deserted. What am I doing so close to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and why do I turn off by St. Martin’s-le-Grand? For the simple reason, that Friday evening is the very best one in the seven to witness the spectacle I am going to see—Newspaper Fair at the General Post Office. In the vast vestibule, or hall, of the establishment so admirably presided over by Mr. Rowland Hill (for I do not reckon the aristocratic placeman who is, turn and turn about, Whig or Tory, its nominal chief, for much), and whose fostering care has made it (with some slight occasional shortcomings) the best-managed and most efficient national institution in Europe, you may observe, in the left-hand corner from the peristyle, and opposite the secretary’s office (tremendous “counts” are the clerks in the secretary’s office, jaunty bureaucrats, who ride upon park hacks, and are “come for” by ringlets in broughams at closing time, but who get through their work in about half the time it would take the ordinary slaves of the desk, simply because their shrewdness and knowledge of the world enables them to “see through a case” before the average man of tape and quill can make up his mind to docket a letter) a huge longitudinal slit in the panelling above, on which is the inscription “For newspapers only.” And all day long, newspapers only, stringed or labelled, are thrust into this incision; and the typographed lucubrations of the some five hundred men who, for salaries ranging from twenty shillings to twenty pounds per week, have to think, and sometimes almost feel, in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, for some sixty millions of people (I say nothing of the re-actionary influence upon foreign nations), go forth to the uttermost ends of the earth. But as six o’clock approaches (and six o’clock sharp is the irrevocable closing time for the departure of newspapers by the current night’s mail), they open a tall window above, and the newspapers are no more thrust, but flung in. [Illustration: SIX O’CLOCK P.M.: THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE.]