The flying Post-office.

This office, which every evening flies away from London to Glasgow, and wherein Government clerks are busily employed in receiving, delivering, and sorting letters all the way, is a narrow carpeted room, twenty-one feet in length by about seven in breadth, lighted by four large reflecting lamps inserted in the roof, and by another in a corner for the guard. Along about two-thirds of the length of this chamber there is affixed to the side wall a narrow table, or counter, covered with green cloth, beneath which various letter bags are stowed away, and above which the space up to the roof is divided into six shelves fourteen feet in length, each containing thirty-five pigeon-holes of about the size of the little compartments in a dove-cote. At this table, and immediately fronting these pigeon-holes, there were standing as we flew along, three Post-office clerks intently occupied in convulsively snatching up from the green-cloth counter, and in dexterously inserting into the various pigeon-holes, a mass of letters which lay before them, and which, when exhausted, were instantly replaced from bags which the senior clerk cut open, and which the guard who had presented them then shook out for assortment. On the right of the chief clerk the remaining onethird of the carriage was filled nearly to the roof with letterbags of all sorts and sizes, and which an able-bodied Post-office guard, dressed in his shirt-sleeves and laced waistcoat, was hauling at and adjusting according to their respective brass-labels. At this laborious occupation the clerks continue standing for about four hours and a half; that is to say, the first set sort letters from London to Tamworth, the second from Tamworth to Preston, the third from Preston to Carlisle, and the fourth letters from Carlisle to Glasgow. The clerks employed in this duty do not permanently reside at any of the above stations, but re usually removed from one to the other every three months. As we sat reclining and ruminating in the corner, the scene was as interesting as it was extraordinary. In consequence of e rapid rate at which we were travelling, the bags which were

hanging from the thirty brass pegs on the sides of the office had a tremulous motion, which at every jerk of the train was changed for a moment or two into a slight rolling or pendulous movement, like towels, &c., hanging in a cabin at sea. While the guard's face, besides glistening with perspiration, was-from the labour of stooping and hauling at large letter-bags-as red as his scarlet coat which was hanging before the wall on a little peg, until at last his cheeks appeared as if they were shining at the lamp immediately above them almost as ruddily as the lamp shone upon them-the three clerks were actively moving their right hands in all directions, working vertically with the same dexterity with which compositors in a printing-office horizontally restore their type into the various small compartments to which each letter belongs. Sometimes a clerk was seen to throw into various pigeon-holes a batch of mourning letters, all directed in the same handwriting, and evidently announcing some death; then one or two registered letters wrapped in green covers. For some time another clerk was solely employed in stuffing into bags newspapers for various destinations. Occasionally the guard, leaving his bags, was seen to poke his burly head out of a large window behind him into pitch darkness, enlivened by the occasional passage of bright sparks from the funnel-pipe of the engine, to ascertain by the flashing of the lamps as he passed them, the precise moment of the train clearing certain stations, in order that he might record it in his "time-bill." Then again a strong smell of burning sealing-wax announced that he was sealing up, and stamping with the Post-office seal, bags three or four of which he then firmly strapped together for delivery. All of a sudden, the flying chamber received a hard sharp blow, which resounded exactly as if a cannon-shot had struck it. This noise, however, merely announced that a station-post we were at that moment passing, but which was already far behind us, had just been safely delivered of four leather letter-bags, which on putting our head out of the window, we saw quietly lying in the far end of a large strong iron-bound sort of landing-net or cradle, which the guard a few minutes before had by a simple movement lowered on purpose to receive them. But not only

H

had we received four bags, but at the same moment, and apparently by the same blow, we had, as we flew by, dropped at the same station three bags which a Post-office authority had been waiting there to receive. The blow that the pendent bag of letters, moving at the rate say of forty miles an hour, receives in being suddenly snatched away, must be rather greater than that which the flying one receives on being suddenly at that rate dropped on the road. Both operations, however, are effected by a projecting apparatus from the flying post-office coming suddenly into contact with that protruding from the post.

As fast as the clerks could fill the pigeon-holes before them, the letters were quickly taken therefrom, tied up into a bundle, and then by the guard deposited into the leather bag to which they belonged. On very closely observing the clerks as they worked, we discovered that, instead of sorting their letters into the pigeon-holes according to their superscriptions, they placed them into compartments of their own arrangement, and which were only correctly labelled in their own minds; but as every clerk is held answerable for the accuracy of his assortment, he is very properly allowed to execute it in whatever way may be most convenient to his mind or hand.

Besides lame writing and awkward spelling, it was curious to observe what a quantity of irrelevant nonsense is superscribed upon many letters, as if the writer's object was purposely to conceal from the sorting clerk the only fact he ever cares to ascertain, namely, the post town. Their patience and intelligence, however, are really beyond all praise; and although sometimes they stand for eight or ten seconds holding a letter close to their lamp, turning sometimes their head and then it, yet it rarely happens that they fail to decipner it. In opening one bag, a lady's pasteboard work-box appeared all in shivers. It had been packed in the thinnest description of whitey-brown paper. The clerk spent nearly two minutes in searching among the fragments for the direction, which he at last discovered in very pale ink, written apparently through a microscope with the point of a needle. The letters sorted in the flying post-office are, excepting a few "late letters," principally cross-post letters, which,

although packed into one bag, are for various localities. For instance, at Stafford the mail takes up a bag made up for Birmingham, Wolverhampton and intermediate places, the letters for which, being intermixed, are sorted by the way, and left at the several stations.

The bags have also to be stowed away in compartments according to their respective destinations. One lot for Manchester, Liverpool, and Dublin; one for Chester; a bundle of bags for Newcastle-under-Lyne, Market-Drayton, Eccleshall, Stone, Crewe, Rhuabon; a quantity of empty bags to be filled coming back; a lot for Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Carlisle; and one great open bag contained all the letter-bags for Dublin taken upon the road.

The minute arrangements necessary for the transaction of all this important business at midnight, while the train is flying through the dark, it would be quite impossible to describe. The occupation is not only highly confidential, but it requires unceasing attention, exhausting to body and mind. Some time ago, while the three clerks, with their right elbows moving in all directions, were vigorously engaged in sorting their letters, and while the guard, with the light of his lamp shining on the gilt buttons and gold lace which emblazoned the pockets of his waistcoat, was busily sealing a letter-bag, a collision took place, which, besides killing four men, at the same moment chucked the sorting clerks from their pigeon-holes to the letter-bags in the guard's compartment. In due time the chief clerk recovered from the shock; but what had happened-why he was lying on the letter-bags-why nobody was sorting until he recovered from his stupor he could not imagine.

CHAPTER XI.

CREW E.

WE have now reached the most important station on the London and North-Western Railway; indeed the works here are on a scale which strikingly exemplifies the magnitude of the arrangements necessary for the maintenance of an arterial railway.

The Company's workshops at Crewe consist of a Locomotive and of a Coach department. In the manufactories of the former are constructed as well as repaired the whole of the engines and tenders required for the Northern Division, namely, from Birmingham to Liverpool; Rugby to Stafford; Crewe to Holyhead; Liverpool to Manchester; Liverpool, Manchester, and Warrington to Preston; Preston to Carlisle. The establishment also "works," as it is termed, the Lancaster and Carlisle and Chester and Holyhead Lines. The total number of miles is at present 360, but the distance of course increases with the completion of every new branch line. In this division there are 220 engines and tenders (each averaging in value nearly 2000), of which at least 100 are at work every day. Besides repairing all these, the establishment has turned out a new engine and tender on every Monday morning since the 1st of January, 1848. The number of workmen employed in the above department is 1600, their wages averaging 38007. a fortnight. The accounts of these expenses, as also a book of "casualties," in which every accident to, as well as every delay of, a train is reported, are examined once a fortnight by a special committee of directors.

Without attempting to detail the various establishments, we will briefly describe a few of their most interesting features.

Close to the entrance of the Locomotive Department stands, as its primum mobile, the tall chimney of a steam-pump, which,