Fourth-Class Postmasters Sometimes
Write Queer Letters, Telling Their
Troubles to the Department.

The eagerness with which fourth-class postmasterships are sought seems strange when one remembers that the salaries are small and the duties often exacting. No fourth-class postmaster receives more than a thousand dollars a year. More than half of them receive less than a hundred dollars a year; fourteen thousand receive less than fifty dollars a year; and hundreds of them receive ten or twelve dollars a year.

Henry A. Castle, former auditor for the Post-Office Department, recently contributed to the Sunday Magazine an article filled with curious information concerning the fourth-class postmaster and his idiosyncrasies. Here, for example, is a facetious letter from an Illinois postmaster who for some time had been vainly trying to resign:

But anyhow, this time I am unanimously through fiddling about it, and this here 'leventh and last resignation of mine has got to be accepted, let the chips fall where they may. Along about four o'clock this afternoon a passel of our best citizens informed me in no uncertain tones that if I wasn't up and gone by midnight they 'lowed to tar and feather and rail-ride me out of our law-abidin' little city, for a small matter that it ain't necessary for me to go into details at present; and a spell ago a friend let me know that they had reconsidered to the extent of decidin' to make it nine o'clock instead of midnight, and were already a-bilin' of the tar.

So you can see for yourself that it is high time for me to step down and out. No more at present from

Yours truly,
T.J. Wackerback.

P.S.—It's eight-forty-two right now, and I'm gone.

An Arkansas postmaster expressed as follows his delight in his appointment:

I feel honored, as in duty bound, by my appointment, and am glad to know, the salary is to be the same as heretofore, namely, nothing a year; for I'd hate like thunder to pay anything.

Illiteracy is not uncommon among the postmasters. Mr. Castle quotes a letter from a Southern ex-postmaster, presumably a negro: