It would almost seem as if we had been instructing our people in the higher branches of education and that large numbers were still in ignorance how to address a letter properly or to see that it is stuck down effectively before it is despatched. The only other explanations must be that hustling and hurry in business are on the increase, and that absent-mindedness is a widespread disease.

But sometimes the reasons for the apparent negligence may be quite different. A heavy letter packet was received as a “Dead Letter” from Australia. It had been posted in London some three or four years before. On opening the packet it was found to contain an old leather pocket-book filled with sovereigns to the number of one hundred. It contained no name of the sender and no communication whatever. It was kept in the safe for three years, was not claimed, and the money was eventually paid into the Revenue.

Another packet mailed “Advertised but not claimed” was returned from the United States. It contained a valuable gold watch embedded in a book. A round well had been cleverly cut through all the pages, and in that the watch had been so tightly deposited that it was difficult to extract it. There was no writing nor any clue to the sender with it. This was never inquired for.

It is possible that both these packets were the fruits of robberies, and the thieves, to avoid the risk of being found with these hauls on them, had made them up into postal packets and addressed them to places where they intended to follow, but their plans had been frustrated.

Here is a curious example of carelessness on the part of a member of the public:—

A registered parcel which reached one of the Returned Letter Branches as undeliverable was found to contain jewellery the value of which must have exceeded £2000. The contents included a pearl and diamond necklace which was valued, according to a letter found in the parcel, at £1100. The sender was advised in the usual course, and in reply she stated that the parcel was of great importance, and she requested that it might be forwarded at once to the correct address (which she furnished), adding that the amount of postage required for re-direction was enclosed. The stamps for fresh postage were not, however, enclosed, but were afterwards received in a registered letter, with a note that the sender had forgotten to enclose them in the first letter. We should not be surprised if we heard that the lady was an authoress.

It is no uncommon occurrence for valuable documents to be found in pillar boxes. Here are a few examples:—Bonds to bearer of the nominal value of £800 were posted inadvertently with their correspondence by a firm of brokers; an unaddressed letter from a marquis enclosing a cheque for £3000; a letter of credit for £1000 posted without address.

A watch and chain, and several articles of personal jewellery such as might fittingly adorn the person of a gentleman in easy circumstances, were found in a pillar box, and the why and the wherefore remained for some time a mystery. Eventually a nurse wrote up to the Head Office about them, and it then appeared that the articles belonged to a poor fellow of weak intellect who, on this particular day, escaped from his keeper, and was subsequently found wandering about in a state of partial undress.

A small bottle of white powder was found loose in the post some years ago. It presented no uncommon feature, and was placed with a number of similar and more or less valuable articles to await inquiry. There was some astonishment when, a few days later, an inquiry came from a professor at an English college describing the contents of the phial as a compound of radium, and stating that the insignificant white powder was almost priceless.

There have been many instances of letters having been posted in the receptacles used by scavengers in cleansing the streets. One old lady complained that letters sent by her were not reaching their destination. On inquiry it was found that she had been in the habit of posting them in a drain outside the post office. But her action was quite intelligent when compared with that of a servant girl who had recently arrived from a rural district, and was sent by her mistress to the bank with a pass-book and cash to the value of £38. The maid, it seems, had possessed from childhood a money-box in the shape of a miniature pillar-box which she always called her bank, and seeing a duplicate of her treasure standing in the street she immediately concluded this was the bank of her mistress; its greater size compared with hers seemed to be evidence of the fact, in that her mistress was a woman of ample means. She then posted both pass-book and money in the pillar-box. On her return she was asked for the pass-book, and replied that she had put it in with the money. “Whom did you see?” asked the mistress. The girl replied, “I couldn't see no one, ma'am, although I looked for a long time in the hole.”

Now let me give a delightful facsimile of the posted packet which is despatched unaddressed.

A lady, almost overcome with indignation, seized a postcard and wrote an angry note to her butcher. In her wrath she thought only of the strong words she wanted to use, and she wrote these on the address portion and then posted the card, omitting altogether the name and address of the butcher.

The notorious “Spanish Swindle” sometimes comes under notice in the Returned Letter Offices. One letter addressed “to Don X. Y. Z., Madrid,” which fortunately for the sender was returned from Spain as undeliverable, was found to contain £185 in bank notes. The sender was an illiterate man who had raised all the money he could in the hope of gaining £10,000.

One of the curious incidents of the office was the return of a letter from Italy in 1905 marked “undeliverable” which had been posted in Ireland in 1862. The letter contained a Second of Exchange for £600.

As a rule the public trusts the Post Office too much. They have a kind of impression that it can work miracles, and very little assistance in consequence is needed on their part. How else can we explain an address such as this? “To my dear Father in Yorkshire at the white cottage with green palings.” This was the address of a packet containing a pair of steel spectacles which a poor girl was sending to her father, implicitly believing that the Post Office would deliver it. Of course it could not be delivered neither could it be returned.

I cannot deny that the Post Office frequently encourages people in the idea that it can do great things. An Aberystwith postman managed to deliver to the proper person a letter bearing the address, “Mrs. Brown, Wearing a Large Bear Boa, Violet Flowers in Bonnet. Promenade mornings, Aberystwith.” The letter was from the lady's son, who had mislaid his mother's seaside address. This was a comparatively easy puzzle, and probably any observant man would have found the lady.

The following was perhaps a little more difficult. An American gentleman arrived in England, and not knowing where a sister was residing at the time, addressed a letter to her previous residence thus—

The letter was delivered to the lady on the top of a coach in Wales, and in thanking the Department for what had been done the gentleman said, “that no other country can show the parallel or would take the trouble at any cost.”

Here is another quaint address: “To the military gentleman who arrived from Aldershot on Thursday, who often stays at the Queen's Hotel, and who wears a long fawn overcoat and light cap. Queen's Hotel.”

I am afraid a great many people furnish puzzle addresses with malice aforethought, and the Department does its best to discourage such attempts to waste its time. An official may sometimes make an effort to deliver such packets, but there is no call upon him to do so. For instance, a letter was posted in London addressed as follows:—

The letter was passed on from one sorter to another, and was finally hung up. Then a sorter wrote in blue pencil across it—

Away went the letter to the extreme north, but Thurso did not own to the young lady. Kirkwall was then tried, and eventually the packet found an owner in a village in the Shetland Islands. This was evidently more than the writer deserved.

A letter was returned undelivered with unmistakable signs on the address portion of the efforts that had been made by the Department to effect its delivery. “Not CÆsar,” “Try Hannibal,” “Not in Jupiter,” “Try Mars,” were the sorters' and postmen's notes, showing that the universe, seen and unseen, had apparently been searched in vain. Yet the owner of the letter was simply an able-bodied seaman attached to the Channel Fleet. Many people will doubtless think what an amusing place the Returned Letter Office must be, and how interesting must be the duty of reading the undelivered letters. But they have only to realise the number which pass through the office daily to understand that very little time can be given to reading other people's correspondence. Moreover, most of it is terribly dull and uninteresting to strangers. Now and then the eye of the clerk spots something good, but he is usually thinking more of correct addresses than jokes. These lines were found in a lost letter written from a wife to her husband at sea:—

The man who supplied me with these verses says the lady mis-spelt “watch” as “whack,” but I see no reason why her sentiments should be explained away.

I am sorry to say that the complaints of the public respecting the non-delivery of their letters are not always politely expressed. No allowance is made for possible errors on the part of the person sending the letter. The following letter is at least outspoken:—

“If I don't get an anser to this I shall say there as been rogery at work somewhere. I wont be rob out of my money not by no one. I sent a P.O. for a pound and it is hard I should waste my time here. If I dont receive a anser on Tuesday morning some one will receive vitrol in their face, if others be rogues I will be villain. i dont mind penal servitude send a anser as soon as possible if you receive same.”

This is, I suppose, what is called being quits.

The following letter was received by the Postmaster-General, and I have seldom seen a case in which the accuser comes into court with dirtier hands:—

“Enclosed please find wrongly addressed envelope which was sent after I had given my correct address to you. Such careless mistakes are deeply to be deplored, and I trust they will not occur again.

“Is there in your Dead Letter Office a post-card addressed to Mr. J. M., 35 —— Villas? If so please return it, as I put the wrong address on it. It was posted three weeks ago.”

There is more justice in the complaint of a man who claimed £2 compensation because a letter containing no value from the woman he was engaged to marry had failed to reach him. In his own words: “That letter I would not have missed for anything—through that I lost a wife. After returning from a nine months' voyage my intended wife was not to be found, and I do not consider £2 full compensation.” There is no doubt, however, that such a sum would have gone a considerable way towards repairing the loss, but the Department was obliged to inform the man that the Postmaster-General could not be held responsible for the loss of the lady. She was not a registered packet.

The form of inquiry which is handed to applicants for missing postal packets does not err by asking too little. A man had carefully and laboriously filled up answers to all the questions relevant and irrelevant to his particular loss, and then he came to the concluding sentence: “Any other observations should be made here.” At this point, his pent-up feelings got the better of him, and he wrote simply “Damn.”

Another story bearing on the complexity of this same form tells of the case of a man who in filling up the form had omitted certain important particulars. The form was returned for completion, only to come back from the postmaster to this effect, that “Mr. —— after filling up the form (in the first instance) had had a fit and died.”

Some postmasters take themselves and their duties very seriously: they will even pursue a missing packet after it has been found. Application had been made respecting a missing letter, and in the course of the official inquiries the papers were referred to the postmaster at the office of posting with a request for precise particulars of posting. Directly afterwards a communication was received from the sender saying that the letter inquired for had been found. This communication was sent forthwith to the postmaster, who it was assumed would understand that the inquiry was at an end. But the postmaster was misjudged: he went on with the case. He kept the case for about six weeks, trying to obtain from the exasperated sender particulars of the posting of the letter. He then returned the papers, confessing that he had been baffled, and that the case was incomplete.

Every Christmas brings a number of letters from children addressed to Santa Claus. One such letter, addressed “Santa Claus, Chimney Corner, Heaven,” was sent by a playful sorter to Hever, Edenbridge, for trial. It is pathetic to think that the destination of all letters so addressed is the prosaic Returned Letter Office. A spinster lady who lived in a county town at a house delightfully named “The Haven” wrote to the Postmaster-General to complain that an official letter had been sent to her bearing a wrong address. The abode with the restful name had actually been described as “The Harem”! No wonder the lady's deepest feelings were aroused, and she was scarcely consoled by the expression of the Postmaster-General's regret that the envelope had been inadvertently addressed in this way.

Here is the facsimile of another envelope:—

Addresses are sometimes obviously taken from invoices or memoranda forms. “Messrs. Hair cut by machinery,” and

are of this kind. This sort of thing is often done by foreigners.

People of the same name living in the same place constantly embarrass the officers of the Department. Two gentlemen, one a Minor Canon and the other an Independent Minister, each bearing the same Christian name and surname, lived in a city on the west coast of England, and it sometimes happened that a letter or parcel intended for the one was delivered to the other, who sent it on to its rightful owner with an apology. These mistakes never caused any misunderstanding until a parcel of game for the Minor Canon was delivered at the house of the Independent Minister, and in his absence was unopened. As soon as he returned home he discovered his mistake and sent the game, which was past eating, to the Minor Canon with a letter of apology. But the loss of the game so upset the Churchman that he wrote to the Dissenter, “If you had not assumed the title of Reverend, to which you have no right, this mistake would not have occurred.” Soon afterwards another parcel was delivered to the Independent Minister, who found the contents to be manuscript sermons that had been ordered by the Minor Canon from an agent who supplied sermons to preachers unable or unwilling to write them. The sermons were at once repacked and sent to their owner with a note: “Sir, if you had not assumed an office for which you have no qualifications, this mistake would not have occurred.”

The Post Office is always delighted to hear of its difficulties being adjusted by the complainants themselves: it can rarely speak out its own mind to the obtuse, the ignorant, and the careless. And it is not the uneducated folk who give the most trouble. In the autumn of 1910 there appeared in the Morning Post a letter signed “John Brown,” and he described himself as “senior partner in the firm of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, Dumpington House, Little Britain.” The letter was obviously written sarcastically, and was a protest from a typical Briton's point of view against compulsory service, on the ground that it would mean interference with his profit-mongering and the curtailment of many of his luxuries. This is the kind of argument he used. “I have often to sign my name fifty times in the course of the day—a hard-working man of business. I must have some relaxation, and how could I obtain this if I were forced to sell my yacht and give up my moor in Scotland, to say nothing of my fishing in Norway. What, again, would my wife and family do without the little villa in the Riviera to fly to from the rigours of an English winter. And what, I should like to know, would my friends say, and how long should I retain them, if I had to make these enormous sacrifices, and all to please a parcel of scaremongers with no knowledge of business, no sense of duty, no appreciation of the claims of a man who would get on in the world and make a figure in the social life of the community?”

A retired military officer read this obviously faked-up letter and boiled over with indignation. He replied “direct,” as he said in a letter to the Department, “to Mr. Brown at the address furnished; but to my surprise my envelope and enclosure were returned through the Dead Letter Office and marked, as you will see on the envelope, 'Not known.' I shall be glad if you will say why my letter was returned. As regards the address, Little Britain, our local postmaster here told me that Little Britain was London, E.C., and further that as a Londoner he knew it quite well.”

The Department never laughs, and rarely gives a reply to anybody without some qualification. The cautious officer dealing with the case replied: “The address in question appears to be fictitious. It is regretted that no assistance can be given you in the matter.” This last sentence may of course have been intentionally subtle, because the assistance which the military gentleman required was evidently in the direction of the surgical operation recommended by Sydney Smith to obtuse North Britons.

The Department was called upon to explain a joke in another instance. The following note appeared outside a wrapper, addressed from Canada to this country:—

“This package contains a pair of undressed kids, size 6¾, colour black finish, extra fine: trade No., 23; manufactured in Paris, France, by Lemoine Fils & Co. To Mrs. J. Smith.”

The recipient, on receipt of the packet, addressed this letter to the Postmaster-General:—

“Dear Sir,—The addressee of the enclosed envelope was the recipient recently of the empty envelope and fillings which I beg to enclose for your inspection. The packet originally contained a pair of black kid gloves sent by Mr. J. Jones, Montreal. The gloves were evidently abstracted in Montreal, as a paper filling, a Montreal newspaper, was used as a blind to fill up the package. I can assure you that it could not have been the nature of a joke. If you can help me in this matter you will confer a favour on yours truly, ——”

Notice the Sherlock-Holmes-like touch in tracing the theft to Montreal. The Post Office again “helped” with this letter. “Inquiry will certainly be made on the receipt of a description from the sender of any article missing from the packet. It is, however, pointed out that the postage prepaid is only sufficient for the present contents and would not carry a pair of gloves, that the cover bears the name of a toy company, and that the superscription may perhaps be a jocular allusion to the black figures of undressed children enclosed in the envelope.”

Every year the Postmaster-General makes the same appeal to the erring British public; he tells them the same pitiful tale of undelivered letters and parcels; he begs that ordinary care and discretion may be observed; and yet the trouble goes on. It is curious how the educated public as well as the uneducated fail in this matter.