Business Interfered with in a Remarkable Manner.
 
The modest estimate which Mrs Bones had formed of her penmanship turned out to be erroneous, and her opinion that there was not a man in the Post-Office able to read it was ill-founded. She was evidently ignorant of the powers and intelligence of the Blind Division.
 
To make this more plain we will follow the letter. You and I, reader, will post ourselves, as it were, and pass through the General Post-Office unstamped. At a few minutes to six p.m. the mouth is wide enough to admit us bodily. Mr Bones has just put in his epistle and walked away with the air of a man who feels that he has committed himself, and is “in for it.” He might have posted it at an office or a pillar nearer home, but he has an idea, founded no doubt on experience, that people, especially policemen, are apt to watch his movements and prefers a longish walk to the General.
 
There! we take a header and descend with the cataract into the basket. On emerging in the great sorting-room, somehow, we catch sight of the Bones epistle at once. There is no mistaking it. We should know its dirty appearance and awry folding—not to mention bad writing—among ten thousand. Having been turned with its stamp in the right direction at the facing-tables and passed under the stamping-machines without notice, it comes at last to one of the sorters, and effectually, though briefly, stops him. His rapid distributive hand comes to a dead pause. He looks hard at the letter, frowns, turns it upside down, turns his head a little on one side, can make nothing of it, puts it on one side, and continues his work.
 
But at the Blind Division, to which it is speedily conveyed, our letter proves a mere trifle. It is nothing to the hieroglyphics which sometimes come under the observation of the blind officers. One of these officers gazes at it shrewdly for a few seconds. “William Stiggs, I think,” he says, appealing to a comrade. “Yes,” replies the comrade, “number six little lady—no—aly—oh, Little Alley, Bring—Bringing—ah, Birmingham!”
 
Just so—the thing is made out almost as quickly as though it had been written in copperplate, and the letter, redirected in red ink, finds its way into the Birmingham mail-bag.
 
So far so good, but there is many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, and other elements were more successful than bad writing in preventing Mr William Stiggs from receiving that letter.
 
When the mail-bag containing it was put into the Travelling Post-Office van, Mr Bright passed in after it. Our energetic sorter was in charge of the van that night, and went to work at once. The letters to be dropped at the early stages of the journey had to be commenced even before the starting of the train. The letter did not turn up at first. The officials, of whom there were six in the van, had littered their sorting-table and arranged many of the letters, and the limited mail was flying north at full speed before the Bones epistle found its appropriate pigeon-hole—for it must be understood that the vans of the Travelling Post-Office—the T.P.O., as it is familiarly called by its friends—are fitted up on one side with a long narrow table, above which are numerous pigeon-holes, arranged somewhat like those of the sorting-tables in the non-travelling Post-Offices. There is a suggestive difference, however, in the former. Their edges are padded to prevent the sorters’ knuckles and noses from being damaged in the event of violent jolting. The sides and ends of the vans are padded all round to minimise their injuries in the event of an accident. Beyond this padding, however, there are no luxuries—no couches or chairs; only a few things like bicycle saddles attached to the tables, astride which the sorters sit in front of their respective pigeon-holes. On the other side of the van are the pegs on which to hang the mail-bags, a lamp and wax for sealing the same, and the apparatus for lowering and lifting the net which catches the bags.
 
Everything connected with railways must needs be uncommonly strong, as the weight of materials, coupled with high speed, subjects all the parts of a carriage to extremely violent shocks. Hence the bag-catching affair is a powerful iron frame with rope netting, the moving of which, although aided by a pulley and heavy weight, tries the strength of a strong man.
 
Nimbly worked the sorters, as they swept by town and field, village, tunnel, bridge, and meadow,—for time may not be wasted when space between towns is being diminished at the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour, and chaos has to be reduced to order. The registered-letter clerk sat in one corner in front of a set of special pigeon-holes, with a sliding cover, which could be pulled over all like a blind and locked if the clerk should have occasion to quit his post for a moment. While some were sorting, others were bagging and sealing the letters. Presently the junior sorter, whose special duty it is to manipulate the net, became aware that a bag-exchanging station ............