Note 160 — Chapter II · ON THE CIRCULATION OF LETTERS.

As the letter-carriers were not employed by Government, curious practices prevailed among them; they seem, in fact, to have performed their duties pretty much as they chose. As a picture not at all uncommon of this class of men and the style in which some of them performed their duties, a sentence from an autobiographical sketch of the period is most graphic: "One villanous old letter-carrier whom I remember was a drunken, surly, dishonest scoundrel, who used to carry the letters away from the office to a wretched den of his own, where I sometimes saw him sorting them on the floor, while he growled and snarled over them, like a dog over a heap of unsatisfactory bones." Not less graphic and true to the life of the period is the following picture of an old rural postman in the good old times, extracted from the pages of a popular work of fiction: "There was a post-office at H——, and an old fellow who stowed away the letters in any or all his pockets, as it best suited him. I have often met him in the lanes thereabouts and asked him for letters. Sometimes I have come upon him, sitting on the hedge bank, resting; and he has begged me to read an address, too illegible for his spectacled eyes to decipher. When I used to ask him if he had anything for me or for Holdsworth (he was never particular to whom he gave his letters, so that he got rid of them somehow and could set off homewards), he would say that he thought he had, for such was his invariable safe form of answer, and would then fumble in breast-pockets, waistcoat-pockets, breeches-pockets, and as a last resort in his coat-tail pockets; and at length tried to comfort me if I looked disappointed by telling me, 'Hoo had missed this toime but was sure to write to-morrow;' 'Hoo' representing with him an imaginary sweetheart."