Before the adoption of the present rates of postage, much ingenuity was displayed in making newspapers the vehicles of such information as should legitimately have been conveyed by letters. Various devices were employed to effect this object.

As the law strictly prohibited writing upon papers, requiring that such newspapers should be charged with letter postage, the problem was, to convey information by their means without infringing the letter of the law.

Sometimes a sentence or a paragraph was selected, some of the letters of which were crossed out in such a manner that the letters left legible conveyed the meaning which the operator intended. By such transmuting process, pugnacious editorials were converted into epistles of the mildest and most affectionate description, and public news of an important character not unfrequently contracted into a channel for the conveyance of domestic intelligence.

As the constructions of the law on this subject, by the officers of the Department, became more and more stringent, the most amusing and ingenious inventions to get beyond their reach were resorted to.

For instance, marking an advertisement or other notice, with a pen or pencil, having been declared a violation of law, attention was sometimes called to such notices, by cutting round them on three sides, thus making a sort of flap, and doubling it back on the side left uncut. In one case, which now occurs to the author, a notice served in that way, thus producing a hole in the paper, had the strikingly appropriate caption of "A good Opening!"

The vacancy produced in the paper, in such a case, of course attracted the attention of the person who received it, and that advertisement was sure to be read, if no other.

Hieroglyphics were sometimes employed for conveying contraband ideas. The following will answer as a specimen of this class of attempted evasions. It was neatly drawn on the margin of a newspaper which came to a Western post-office, from a town in New England.

The meaning will of course he readily understood by the reader—"Children all well!"

Such specimens of the fine arts are seldom attempted under the present low rates of postage, as the saving of two cents would hardly pay for the required time or labor. But there are those even now-a-days, who, for that paltry consideration, are found willing to compromise their consciences, if indeed they have any, by resorting to some of the less laborious methods, in attempting to carry out their prudential designs.