[157] The construction of the offices have been entirely altered of late years with this view, being now as safe as they can well be made.
[158] The contrivance for exchanging mail-bags is now used at more than a hundred different railway-stations. At some stations it is used four, six, and eight times every working day. Mr. Ramsay, of the General Post-Office is said to have suggested the machinery in question; but his original invention was rude and somewhat unsatisfactory in application. Mr. Dicker made improvements in its construction so that it could be generally used. For his services, Mr. Dicker received from the Lords of the Treasury the sum of 500l. and the Postmaster-General found him a place as "Supervisor of Mail-bag Apparatus." Mr. Pearson Hill is credited with further improvements.
[159] Several individual cases of injury to the eyesight from railway travelling, or, what is still more probable, from an imperfect system of lighting, occur to us, but the general result may remain unquestioned.
[160] As the letter-carriers were not employed by Government, curious practices prevailed among them; they seem, in fact, to have performed their duties pretty much as they chose. As a picture not at all uncommon of this class of men and the style in which some of them performed their duties, a sentence from an autobiographical sketch of the period is most graphic: "One villanous old letter-carrier whom I remember was a drunken, surly, dishonest scoundrel, who used to carry the letters away from the office to a wretched den of his own, where I sometimes saw him sorting them on the floor, while he growled and snarled over them, like a dog over a heap of unsatisfactory bones." Not less graphic and true to the life of the period is the following picture of an old rural postman in the good old times, extracted from the pages of a popular work of fiction: "There was a post-office at H——, and an old fellow who stowed away the letters in any or all his pockets, as it best suited him. I have often met him in the lanes thereabouts and asked him for letters. Sometimes I have come upon him, sitting on the hedge bank, resting; and he has begged me to read an address, too illegible for his spectacled eyes to decipher. When I used to ask him if he had anything for me or for Holdsworth (he was never particular to whom he gave his letters, so that he got rid of them somehow and could set off homewards), he would say that he thought he had, for such was his invariable safe form of answer, and would then fumble in breast-pockets, waistcoat-pockets, breeches-pockets, and as a last resort in his coat-tail pockets; and at length tried to comfort me if I looked disappointed by telling me, 'Hoo had missed this toime but was sure to write to-morrow;' 'Hoo' representing with him an imaginary sweetheart."
[161] We still sometimes hear reports, to the effect that deliveries in some towns are not made unless there are a certain number of letters. Of course this is never so, but it reminds us of a (reported) postal regulation in a certain British dependency, where the postman (who is a person of intelligence) always reads the letters committed to his care, and delivers them only if important; otherwise, it is said, he makes them wait for the following mail!
[162] The postmaster sometimes transacts his business in another separate apartment, the control of the office, when he is not immediately present, devolving on the senior clerk on duty.
[163] Machines for letter-stamping have been in use for some time in London and Paris. They are not yet perfect enough for general use.
[164] It is generally allowed that the country postmen are, as a rule, such as we have described them. Edward Capern, the Wayside Poet, at the time a rural letter-carrier between Bideford and Buckland Brewer, Devonshire, walking thirteen miles a-day, Sunday included, for 10s. 6d. a-week has described their life in the following poem:—
"O! the postman's is as blessed a life
As any one's, I trow,
If leaping the stile o'er many a mile
Can blessedness bestow.
"If tearing your way through a tangled wood,
Or dragging your limbs through a lawn;
If wading knee-deep through an angry flood,
Or a plough'd field newly sown,—