The inland money-order business continues to diminish; this is owing to the introduction of postal orders, which took place in 1880, since which date the annual number issued has been decreased by about six millions. On the other hand, with the colonies, and in both directions with foreign countries, there has been a ‘satisfactory increase.’ The Report recommends the use of money orders in preference to postal orders, in spite of their involving more trouble, on the ground of the greater security. It appears there is ‘a frequent or almost universal omission on the part of the public to take so ordinary a precaution as to fill in the name of the person to whom the order is payable, and the office at which it should be cashed.’ It goes on to add that a proposal to reduce the rates will shortly be under consideration. The orders issued in India and the colonies show an increase of 29,000 in number, amounting to £18,000; while the increase in the orders issued on board Her Majesty’s ships is as many as 67,900, or, in cash, £43,400.
The telegraph department’s figures do not so readily lend themselves to comparison, as during the last six months the sixpenny rate has been in force. Comparing the last six months with the corresponding period in the year 1884-85, we have an increase of 48 per cent., and a decrease of £40,233 in the revenue; but against this loss must be placed the sum of £18,214 received on account of the large additional number of abbreviated telegraph addresses; this reduces the loss caused by the reduced rate to £22,019. The increase in the number of local messages in London alone was no less than 74 per cent. The twenty-seven telephone exchanges have now 1255 subscribers; and since the 1st of April 1883 we are told that some 1400 miles of line have been laid, for which some 29,000 miles of wire and £64,000 worth of red fir poles from Norway have been used. The pneumatic-tube system, too, is coming still more into use, and a rate of speed has been attained varying between seventeen and thirty-four miles an hour according to circumstance.
The gross revenue for the year was £10,278,865; while the gross expenditure was £7,569,983; the net revenue, therefore, was £2,708,882, being an increase of £62,584 on the previous year.
New post-offices have been opened in 371 places in the United Kingdom, and about 860 letter-boxes been added. Not only have Her Majesty’s lieges had their letters carried and their parcels delivered with speed and almost unfailing accuracy, but, after all expenses have been deducted, the postal arrangements have been so satisfactorily carried out, that the public purse has been swelled by a profit of over £2,700,000.
IN ALL SHADES.
CHAPTER XLVII.
When Mr Dupuy heard from his daughter’s own lips the news of her engagement to Harry Noel, his wrath at first was absolutely unbounded; he stormed about the house, and raved and gesticulated. He refused ever to see Harry Noel again, or to admit of any proffered explanation, or to suffer Nora to attempt the defence of her own conduct. He was sure no defence was possible, and he wasn’t going to listen to one either, whether or not. He even proposed to kick Harry out of doors forthwith for having thus taken advantage in the most abominable manner of his very peculiar and unusual circumstances. Whatever came, he would never dream of allowing Nora to marry such an extremely ungentlemanly and mean-spirited fellow.
But Mr Dupuy didn’t sufficiently calculate upon the fact that in this matter he had another Dupuy to deal with, and that that other Dupuy had the indomitable family will quite as strongly developed within her as he himself had. Nora stuck bravely to her point with the utmost resolution. As long as she was not yet of age, she said, she would obey her father in all reasonable matters; but as soon as she was twenty-one, Orange Grove or no Orange Grove, she would marry Harry Noel outright, so that was the end of it; and having delivered herself squarely of this profound determination, she said not a word more upon the subject, but left events to work out their own course in their own proper and natural fashion.
Now, Mr Dupuy was an obstinate man; but his obstinacy was of that vehement and demonstrative kind which grows fiercer and fiercer the more you say to it, but wears itself out, of pure inanition, when resolutely met by a firm and passive silent opposition. Though she was no psychologist, Nora had hit quite unconsciously and spontaneously upon this best possible line of action. She never attempted to contradict or gainsay her father, whenever he spoke to her angrily, in one of his passionate outbursts, against Harry Noel; but she went her own way, quietly and unobtrusively, taking it for granted always, in a thousand little undemonstrative ways, that it was her obvious future rôle in life to marry at last her chosen lover. And as water by continual dropping wears a hole finally in the hardest stone, so Nora by constant quiet side-hints made her father gradually understand that she would really have Harry Noel for a husband, and no other. Bit by bit, Mr Dupuy gave way, sullenly and grudgingly, convinced in his own mind that the world was being rapidly turned topsy-turvy, and that it was no use for a plain, solid, straightforward old gentleman any longer to presume single-handed upon stemming the ever-increasing flood of revolutionary levelling sentiment. It was some solace to his soul, as he yielded slowly inch by inch, to think that if for once in his life he had had to yield, it was at least to a born Dupuy, and not to any pulpy, weak-minded outsider whatever.
So in the end, before the steamer was ready to sail, he had been brought, not indeed to give his consent to Nora’s marriage—for that was more than any one could reasonably have expected from a man of his character—but to recognise it somehow in an unofficial dogged fashion as quite inevitable. After all, the fellow was heir to a baronetcy, which is always an eminently respectable position; and his daughter in the end would be Lady Noel; and everybody said the young man had behaved admirably on the night of the riot; and over in England—well, over in England it’s positively incredible how little right and proper feeling people have got upon these important racial matters.