Note 236 — Chapter IX

A third letter to the postal reformer, also delivered, came directed to the General Post Office to “Mr Owl O Neill.” Owing to the present spread of education, the once numerous (and genuine) specimens of eccentric spelling are yearly growing fewer, so that the calling of “blind man”—as the official decipherer of illegible and ill-spelled addresses is not very appropriately termed—is likely to become obsolete. It would surely have given any ordinary mortal a headache to turn “Uncon” into Hong-Kong, “Ilawait” into Isle of Wight, “I Vicum” into High Wycombe, “Searhoo Skur” into Soho Square, or “Vallop a Razzor” into Valparaiso. Education will also deprive us of insufficiently addressed letters. “Miss Queene Victoria of England” did perhaps reach her then youthful Majesty from some Colonial or American would-be correspondent; but what could have been done with the letter intended for “My Uncle Jon in London,” or that to “Mr Michl Darcy in the town of England”? The following pair of addresses are unmistakably Hibernian. “Dennis Belcher, Mill Street, Co. Cork. As you turn the corner to Tom Mantel's field, where Jack Gallavan's horse was drowned in the bog-hole,” and “Mr John Sullivan, North Street, Boston. He's a man with a crutch. Bedad, I think that'll find him.” That the French Post Office also required the services of “blind man” these strange addresses, taken from Larouse's “Dictionnaire du XIXe Siècle,” vol. xii. p. 1,497, demonstrate. The first, “À monsieur mon fils à Paris,” reached its destination because it was called for at the chief office, where it had been detained, by a young man whose explanation satisfied the enquiring official. Whether the letter addressed to Lyon, and arriving at a time of thaw, “À M. M., demeurant dans la maison auprès de laquelle il y a un tas de neige” was delivered is not so certain.