The description furnished by Scott in the 'Antiquary' of the internal management of a country Post-office, as existing towards the close of last century, is extremely amusing and piquant; but the probability is that, while so much of what is said might be true to circumstances, the picture was heightened in colour for the purpose of literary effect. No doubt a certain amount of gossip emerged from such country offices, derived from the outsides and occasionally from the insides of letters; yet it is hardly likely that a group of curious women should have gathered together in the postmaster's room to make a general overhaul of the contents of the mail-bag, as is described in the case of the Post-office at Fairport. In small country towns in the present day, it is no uncommon thing to attribute the spread of "secrets" about the place to a breach of confidence at the Post-office, while the real fact is that things told by the persons concerned in strictest secrecy to their most intimate friends are by these communicated again to other kind friends, and so the ripple of information rolls on till there is no longer any secret at all, and the poor official at the Post-office is assumed to be the only possible offender. The smaller the place the greater is the thirst for neighbourly gossip, the more quickly does it spread when out, and the more ready are those whose secrets ooze forth to point the finger of suspicion at the Post-office.

Every one knows what a small country Post-office is nowadays. When we seek change of air and relaxation in the holiday season, choice is made maybe of some little country village or seaside resort whereat to spend the few weeks at our disposal. If the place be a place at all, there we shall find a Post-office; but possibly there is no house-to-house delivery, and letters must be called for at the Post-office itself. As the post-hour approaches, groups of visitors take up positions near the office door, or squat themselves down on any patch of sward that may be conveniently near. Young ladies waited upon by their admirers, mothers with their children, a bachelor group or two from the inn, and here and there a native of the place, some expecting letters, others indulging a feeble hope in that direction, attend as assistants at what is one of the excitements of the day. Presently the post-runner, with his wallet slung upon his back and a rustic walking-stick in his hand, appears in the distance, jogging along with that steady swinging stride which is so characteristic of his class. The visitors begin to close up around the Post-office; in a few minutes the runner steps into it; he throws down his wallet of treasures on the counter, removes his faded and dusty hat, and with his coloured cotton handkerchief wipes the sweat from his soiled and heated face. Meanwhile the attention of the postmistress is given to the contents of the bag; and as the expectant receivers of letters crowd in at or around the door, a few who have been unable to approach sufficiently near derive what consolation they can from eyeing the operations through the shop window, or by vainly endeavouring to catch an early glimpse of some well-known superscription as the letters pass one by one through the hands of the postmistress.

The division of the letters, which can hardly be called a system of sorting, is a proceeding worthy of study. Some letters are placed up on end against sweetie-bottles in the window, others are laid down on shelves, others again are spread out on drawers or tables, quite in an arbitrary fashion. The postmistress has no difficulty in reading the addresses, as a rule, but the name of a new-comer seems to demand a little study: the letter is looked at back and front, and then laid down hesitatingly in a place by itself, as if it were an uncanny thing. The address of a letter for any young lady supposed to be engaged in correspondence of a tender kind seems also to require scrutiny; and should she happen to be well in at the door, it is immediately handed to her, those who are in the secret and those who are not forming different ideas as to the reason for this special mark of favour. While this is being done, an undefined sensation is produced in the small crowd, and the recipient retires in confusion to peruse the letter in peace and quiet elsewhere. At length the whole treasures are ready, and the distribution to the eager callers is a matter of a very few minutes, to be renewed again at the same hour next day.

Something like this is the routine observed when the delivery is being effected at small rural Post-offices in our own days—the keeper of the post being a shopkeeper, generally a grocer.

In the earlier history of the post, and up till the time of mail-coaches, the Post-office was very generally to be found established at the inn of the place. There was an evident convenience in this, owing to the innkeeper being the postmaster in the other and original sense of the provider of horses to ride post, when it was common to send on expresses, by means of these agents, from stage to stage. But the innkeepers, being often farmers besides, had business more important than that of the post to look after, and consequently the work was delegated to others. The duty of receiving and despatching the mails was frequently left to waiters or chambermaids, with the undesirable but inevitable result that the work was badly done. Often there was no separate place set apart for Post-office business; letters were sorted in the bar or in one of the public rooms, where any one could see them, thereby excluding all possibility of secrecy in dealing with the correspondence. Referring to the middle of last century, a surveyor expressed himself to the effect that "the head ostler was often the postmaster's prime minister in matters relating to the mails."

Interior of an Old Post-office.

Interior of an Old Post-office.

The interest taken by Boniface in the Post-office does not seem to have been very great; for an English surveyor, writing in 1792, thus expresses himself: "Persons who keep horses for other uses, and particularly innkeepers, may assuredly more conveniently and at less expense work the mails than those who keep horses for that business only. But, on the other hand, it may be observed that innkeepers, so far from paying Government service the compliment of employing in it their best horses, too often send their worst with the mails; and as to their riders, they are, in general, the dregs of the stable-yard, and by no means to be compared to those employed by postmasters in private stations."

Lack of interest in the mails did not, however, stand in the way of their turning the post to account in favour of their visitors; for in another official report the following observation is made on the subject of franking: "The Post-office is not of the consequence or recommendation to an inn which it used to be before the restriction in franking took place; and a traveller, now finding that my host at the public office is deprived of that privilege, moves over to the Red Lyon."

When mail-coaches came to be put upon the road, the necessity for having postmasters other than innkeepers forced itself upon the authorities, so that there should be an independent check upon the contractors, and a better regulation of the arrival and departure of the mails, with less chance of excuse for delays; and thus a change was brought about in the status of country postmasters.

But postmasters in the old days do not seem to have been uniformly happy in their posts. The following from a surveyor's report of December 1792, relating to the postmaster of Wetherby, in Yorkshire, shows this, and no doubt describes the case accurately. The Wetherby office had been made more important by some rearrangement of posts, with the result which the surveyor thus pathetically brings under notice: "The Postmaster-General's humanity, I humbly apprehend, would be very much affected if they knew exactly the situation of this poor deputy. He has now experienced the difference between his former snug duty and the very great fatigue of a large centre office, and labour throughout almost the whole of every night since the 10th October 1791. Also the very heavy expenses incurred thereby for assistance, coal, candles, paper, wax, &c., without any addition to his salary. To add to his distresses—for he is not rich" (who ever heard of a rich postmaster?)—"he has been so closely pressed from the Bye-letter Office for his balance due there as to have been compelled to borrow money to discharge them, at the very time that he could not obtain any account from the General Office, nor warrants for payment of as large sums due to him."

It is not difficult to picture this poor postmaster of Wetherby, tied to duty all night long arranging his mails by the light of a guttering candle, and smarting under financial difficulties; the Head Office squeezing him for revenue with one hand, and holding back what was due to him for his services with the other.

Sometimes country Post-offices would be the scene of small gatherings late at night, waiting the arrival of the mail, as was the case at Dumfries in 1799, when some few of the inhabitants would wait up till ten, eleven, or twelve o'clock to receive the English newspapers, so eager were they to peruse them.

Similar anxiety to be first in possession of commercial or political news conveyed through the newspapers was no doubt common to all business centres at the period referred to; though in our own age such information is largely anticipated and discounted by the telegraph, and in this respect the circumstances have changed. Senex, in 'Glasgow Past and Present,' humorously describes the scene enacted at the Tontine Coffee Rooms, in Glasgow, during the French War, at the close of last century, on the arrival of the mail. He says:—"Immediately on receiving the bag of papers from the Post-office, the waiter locked himself up in the bar, and after he had sorted the different papers and had made them up in a heap, he unlocked the door, and making a sudden rush into the middle of the room, he tossed up the whole lot of newspapers as high as the ceiling. Now came the grand rush and scramble of the subscribers, every one darting forward to lay hold of a falling newspaper. Sometimes a lucky fellow got hold of five or six newspapers, and ran off with them to a corner, in order to select his favourite paper; but he was always hotly pursued by some half-dozen of the disappointed scramblers, who, without ceremony, pulled from his hands the first paper they could lay hold of, regardless of its being torn in the contest. On these occasions I have often seen a heap of gentlemen sprawling on the floor of the room, and riding upon one another's backs like a parcel of boys. It happened, however, unfortunately, that a gentleman in one of these scrambles got two of his teeth knocked out of his head, and this ultimately brought about a change in the manner of delivering the newspapers."

Again, when a mail was passing through a town between stages in the middle of the night, the postmaster, awoke by the postboy's horn, would present himself at an upper window and take in his bag by means of a hook and line, his body shivering the while in the cold night blast.

An instance of such a proceeding is given by Williams in his history of Watford, where the destinies of the post were, at the time, presided over by a postmistress. "In response," says he, "to the thundering knock of the conductor, the old lady left her couch, and thrusting her head, covered with a wide bordered night-cap, out of the bedroom window, let down the mail bag by a string, and quickly returned to her bed again." Coming thus nightly to the open window in her night dress could not have been without its risks to a delicate creature like the postmistress.

These postmasters required looking after occasionally, however, for they sometimes did wrong. In 1668 the postmaster of Edinburgh got into trouble by levying charges of 1d., 2d., or 3d. upon letters over and above the proper rates, and he was peremptorily ordered to discontinue the practice.

The Postmistress of Watford despatching the Mail.

The Postmistress of Watford despatching the Mail.

They also, it would appear, exercised some sort of surveillance over private correspondence. Chambers, in his 'Domestic Annals of Scotland,' to which valuable work we are again indebted, gives a case in point: "In July 1701, two letters from Brussels, having the cross upon the back of them, had come with proper addresses under cover to the Edinburgh postmaster. He was surprised with them, and brought them to the Lord Advocate, who, however, on opening them, found they were of no value, being only on private business; wherefore he ordered them to be delivered by the postmaster to the persons to whom they were directed." Yet zeal for the King's interest did not always have an acceptable reward, as is shown by the Scotch Privy Council Record of 1679. The keeper of the Edinburgh letter-office was accused of "sending up a bye-letter with the flying packet upon the twenty-two day of June last, giving ane account to the postmaster of England of the defeat of the rebels in the west, which was by the said postmaster communicated to the King before it could have been done by his Majesty's Secretary for Scotland, and which letter contains several untruths in matter of fact." For having forestalled his Majesty's Secretary, probably, rather than for the inaccuracy as to facts, the keeper of the post was sent to the Tolbooth, there to meditate upon the unprofitableness of official zeal, during the Council's pleasure.

It does not seem to have been thought prudent to intrust the date-stamping of letters to postmasters generally until some time in the present century. Down to the close of last century, at any rate, according to a Survey report of the year 1800, this was allowed only at the more important offices. The report is as follows:—"In regard to having the Dumbarton letters stamped with the day of the month, as now done at Glasgow, the subject has often been considered, and although it has been approved of with some large commercial towns in England, and Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, it has been much doubted how far it would be proper or necessary to establish it generally with less towns, where the practice might be more subject to irregularity or abuses, besides the very great expense such a supply of stamps would occasion to the revenue."

The smallness of the salaries allowed to the postmasters of former times is referred to in another chapter, and this may, no doubt, have contributed to the lack of interest taken in the work by some of these officials.

But while their pay was small, a good deal of form and circumstance attended their appointment, as will be seen from the following reproduction, on a reduced scale, of the formal appointment of the postmaster of East Grinstead in 1786. From a Post-office point of view the form is interesting, as no such documents are now in use.

Facsimile

Traditions of hard work and long hours linger still in the Post-office, though nowadays the periods of duty are generally reduced to moderate limits. Some idea of the service required to be rendered formerly by Post-office servants may be gathered from the following order, dating about 1780 or 1790. It refers to the Secretary to the Post-office in Dublin, but we ought perhaps to put a very free interpretation upon it:—"The duty of the Secretary is to carry on the general correspondence, and, under the direction of the Postmaster-General, to superintend the whole business of the office; to attend the Board, and give directions for carrying into execution the orders of the Postmaster-General. His attendance is constant, and at all hours by day and by night—generally from 7 until 10, from 12 until 5, and from 9 until 11 o'clock each day."

The postmasters of the United Kingdom are a very large class, numbering many thousands, and comprising every variety of individual from the honest country shopkeeper to the highly intelligent men who are placed in charge of the offices in our principal towns. The former have enough to do in mastering the various codes of rules under which the many branches of business are carried on; while the latter, in exercising discipline over their forces, carrying out changes of administration, and endeavouring to meet the wishes of a public ever wakeful to their interests and privileges, are something in their way like petty sovereigns, of whom it might not inaptly be said, "Uneasy is the head that wears a crown," though the material emblem itself be wanting