"Drove away!" exclaimed Mrs Petre with a flash of her old temper, which as I have before said, was a very violent one; Janet's presence no doubt emboldening her to find fault with Mrs Danton's arrangements. "Go and see where it has been sent to."
"Mrs Danton has sent the coachman to Lynton, to get a fowl for your dinner," said Janet, coming back after her inquiry.
"I didn't want a fowl; I won't have a fowl! What does she mean by sending for a fowl for me?"
'When Janet departed, she left Mrs Petre irritated against Mrs Danton—a hopeful sign that self-assertion might yet enable her to shake off the trammels into which she has got herself. And Janet thereupon sat down and wrote a joyous little note to Mrs Aubrey Stanmore, which she posted.
[POST-LETTER ITEMS.]
As lately as 1839, each inhabitant of these islands only wrote on an average three letters per annum. In 1840, the year associated with the introduction of the penny post, the total number of letters rose to one hundred and sixty-nine millions, giving an average of seven letters to each person, or something more than double the average of the preceding year. Since then, the history of the British Post-office, the greatest emporium of letters in the world, has simply been the history of the growth of commerce and civilisation in our midst. Each year the number of letters has surely and steadily increased, until, in 1875, it reached the enormous total of a thousand and eight millions, or an average of thirty-one letters to each person in the United Kingdom. Besides these, there were more than eighty-seven millions of post-cards, and very nearly two hundred and eighty millions of newspapers and book packets; so that a grand total of nearly fourteen hundred millions of all descriptions of postal matter is reached. How few of us can realise at the first blush what a thousand millions represents!
While the average number of letters to each person in the United Kingdom in 1875 was thirty-one, it was as high as thirty-five in England and Wales, and as low as thirteen in Ireland. Scotland occupies the happy medium between the two, shewing an average exactly double that of Ireland, and about twenty-five per cent. below that of England and Wales. It may be doubted, however, whether purely social and domestic correspondence by letter is less frequently indulged in by the Scotch people than by the English; and probably if London, where there is quite an abnormal amount of correspondence, were excluded from the calculation, Scotland would be found to be very nearly on a level with England.
It is a striking and gratifying fact that only a mere fraction of the total number of letters posted fail to reach their destination. People often grumble at the bore of letter-writing, but seldom think of the boon they enjoy in the penny post. To write, address, and post a letter—and this is all the sender is required to do—is a mere trifle, compared with the labour of the Post-office in earning the 'nimble penny,' which is affixed to the letter in the shape of the 'Queen's Head.' Think of what has to be done for a letter posted, say, in the suburbs of London, and addressed to some remote village in the north of England or in Scotland. Perhaps it has been posted over-night, in which case the letter-carrier will be busy collecting and conveying it to the sub-district office some hours before moderately early people are thinking of getting up. From the Sub, it will be conveyed to the Head District Office, there to be stamped, sorted, and despatched to St Martin's-le-Grand. Here, in company with many thousands of others which have arrived in the same way, it will probably be manipulated as many as half-a-dozen times, in the different processes of facing, dividing, sorting, and so on, before it reaches the stage of being tied up in a bundle with a hundred or more of its fellows addressed to the same town or district, and despatched on what may probably be only the initial stage of its journey. If a night letter, Fate may decree that it should pass under the scrutinising glance of that sleepless official, the travelling sorter; in which case the bag, with its seal hardly 'set' as yet, will be ruthlessly torn open, and the bundles dispersed to the four corners of the railway sorting tender. Here is a miniature post-office, with pigeon-holes, bags, and bundles innumerable; whose officials, in a desperate effort to keep ahead of the train, wait not for the shrill whistle of the guard or the first puff of the engine to commence their hard night's work. There are letters, letters everywhere, and not a moment to lose. There may be a bag to sort and drop before the train has accomplished the first dozen miles of its journey. Our letter is amongst the heap lying ready to be operated upon; it will be got ready by-and-by, and towards the gray of the morning it will be dropped at some little roadside station, whither the mail-cart driver has driven half-a-dozen miles or more to receive it. Thence to the post-office, another half-dozen miles; and here again the familiar process of unpacking, resorting, and re-stamping. Our letter is not for the town at which the bag is opened, but for one of its outlying villages; and the rural postman must be called in before the transaction, commenced in London some ten or twelve hours previously, can be completed. Away he goes, ere yet it is daylight, bag on shoulder, stick in hand, thinking less, probably, of the precious secrets of which he is the bearer, than of his return with a similar, although probably a lighter load in the evening. His life is not exactly one round of pleasure, but an out-and-home sort of journey, in which there is very little real progress, and the 'lettered ease' of which consists in the occasional Sundays on which he is relieved of his burden. He is the final link in the chain which, in the shape of men, horses, steam-engines, has had to be put in motion in order to deliver our penny letter!
Letters may be posted at no fewer than twenty-three thousand five hundred receptacles throughout the United Kingdom. How various is the character of these so-called receptacles! Here is the stately post-office of many of our great towns, situated in the very centre of life and activity. There the wayside letter-box, far removed from human habitation and, to all appearance, from human necessity. Lonely roads are no bar to the progress of the rural postman; although the Postmaster-general relates how an attempt to provide postal facilities in a certain district in the west of Ireland was frustrated by a superstitious objection to collect the letters from a wall-box, because 'a ghost went out nightly on parade' in the neighbourhood. Between the stately post-office and the wayside letter-box there are several different kinds of receptacles for letters: there is the branch post-office, an offshoot of the parent establishment; the receiving-house, at which a kind of uncovenanted postal service is carried on; and the pillar letter-box, which is dotted about our great towns almost as plentifully as lamp-posts are. In London there are no fewer than eighteen hundred receptacles for letters, and of these more than eleven hundred are pillar and wall letter-boxes. The public have a peculiar affection for the pillar-box, thinking probably that it can tell no tales. The writer remembers perfectly well seeing a pillar-box thrown down by a passing wagon in one of the streets of London, and afterwards turned with the 'slit' or aperture downward, so that it might not be used until re-erected. But despite this, it was rolled over and several letters inserted in it while it lay prostrate in the gutter! Similarly, letters intended to be 'posted' have often been dropped into the letter-boxes of private firms, and even into the 'street orderly bins' which stand at no great distance from the pillar letter-boxes in the city of London.