each division being treated in like manner. When the letters for any one street or road, etc., have been set in order, fresh batches of letters of, say, thirty or so, are fully sub-divided by the same process before being set in with the accumulated and finished letters. This course is necessary in order to obviate the postman having to go through a set of fifty or a hundred letters time after time as he gets a fresh batch of letters. Two hours are allowed for the morning delivery and one and a half hours for other deliveries. As those who have the longest rounds have the lightest burdens, they all contrive to finish at about the same time.
The Clifton Suspension Bridge, which was erected in 1864 at a cost of £100,000, plays a very unimportant part in postal affairs, as it serves for the passage over the Avon of three postmen only, who cross with letters for the Leigh Woods and Failand districts. Long Ashton, which has a carriage road approached by the bridge from the Clifton side, receives its letters by a postman who crosses by a ferry lower down the river and reaches his destination more expeditiously than by crossing over the bridge.
A Bristol postman, who was well acquainted with the locality which he had to serve, met with an ugly accident through colliding with a lamp-post, recently erected and not supplied with gas for lighting up. It had been put up during the man's interval of duty, so that he came upon it for the first time when it was shrouded in darkness. The postmen, having in the discharge of their duties to be early birds and to be first out and about in the morning, often pick up articles lost or deposited overnight. Thus it was that a postman found on one winter's morn in a Bristol suburb a parcel containing the dead body of a child, and had to constitute himself a corpse-carrier for the nonce. It was in this city of Bristol that the following somewhat amusing and certainly interesting incident took place. Two rats were found in combat over a letter, which, delivered in due course by the postman, had fallen upon the floor at the entrance to a warehouse, and had been dragged thence to the spot where the rodents were engaged in their fierce encounter, the gum on the flap probably being the attraction. The letter contained a cheque for £300, and its loss for some days caused no small amount of consternation and
anxiety to the gentleman who should have received it, and who, it need scarcely be said, at once gave orders for a letter-box to be attached to his warehouse door.
It was well for the Magistrates' Clerk for the Gloucestershire Division of Bristol that he was well known to the postman, or assuredly he would never have received the letter addressed thus: "Mr. Latchem Laforegat pleace stashun," the proper address being: "Mr. Latcham, Lawford's Gate Police Station, Stapleton Road, Bristol."
Recently many valuable dogs were poisoned in different parts of the city, and a suggestion appeared in the newspapers that the postmen might be urged to constitute themselves amateur detectives for the discovery of the miscreants, on the ground that they enter every garden and knock at every door throughout the length and breadth of Bristol, and that at early morn and late at night as well as by day. The postmen are public spirited, but it is hardly likely that they would go considerably out of their way for the purpose, considering the risks which they run from dogs and the annoyances to which they are subjected to by
them. The postmen have to face the snappish terrier and the ferocious-looking bulldog. Not infrequently they get bitten, and more frequently get soundly abused if, for their own protection, they belabour a dog occasionally, or give it a taste of their belt for want of a better weapon of defence or offence. Reciprocity would demand that if the postmen look out for dog poisoners, the owners of dogs on their part should take the utmost care to keep their dogs properly secured when known to be dangerous or to have a special dislike to the public servants in blue. The bold announcement given on the pillar of a gateway of a residence in a fashionable suburb of Bristol, "Beware of the bulldog," is not calculated to give confidence to the postmen who have to deliver the letters. One poor dog, well known in the city, fell dead in Small Street; and as the dog had just been seen to visit the Post Office, and even to drink from a Bristol Dogs' Home trough standing in the portico, it was assumed by the many spectators of the poodle's sad death that he had come to an untimely end through drinking poisoned water from the Post Office trough. The
vessel was therefore confiscated by an over-zealous supporter of the Dogs' Home, and the water was subjected to analysis, but investigation proved that it was innocuous, although from an examination it transpired that the dog really had died from poison, which had, however, been taken in meat.
A London firm made indignant enquiry as to why a letter had been returned to them through the Returned Letter Office, seeing that it was addressed to a well-known and distinguished baronet living near Bristol. It turned out that the right hon. gentleman was himself the cause of the return of the letter, as he read the contracted words "Rt. Honb.," in a line preceding his own name, as the name of "Robt. Hunt," a person who lived near his mansion, and he gave the letter back to the postman with the foregoing result. In 1847 a letter indicative of the times, with the following superscription, as noticed in the post:—"To the Post Office, Bristol, Somersetshire, England, 115 miles west of London, this letter is to be delivered to the Ladey that transported Jobe Smith and 2 others with him near Bristol." Members of the public complain from time to time in indignant terms respecting