one of whom that youngest son had imprudently married."

The foregoing is from the Report of the Secret Committee appointed to investigate the practice in 1844, and which contains some very curious matter. Whole mails, it appears, were sometimes detained for several days during the late war, and all the letters individually examined. French, Dutch, and Flemish enclosures were rudely rifled, and kept or sent forward at pleasure. There can be no doubt that in some cases, such as frauds upon banks or the revenue, forgeries, or murder, the power of opening letters was used, impartially to individuals and beneficially to the State; but the discoveries made thereby were so few that it did not in any way counterbalance the great public crime of violating public confidence and perpetuating an official immorality.

Thus far we have walked with our reader, and explained to him the curious machinery which acts upon the vast correspondence of the metropolis with the country, and of the country generally with foreign parts, within the establishment at St. Martin's-le-Grand. The machinery for its conveyance is still more vast, if not so intricate. The foreign mails have at their command a fleet of steamers such as the united navies of the world can scarcely match, threading the coral reefs of the "lone Antilles," skirting the western coast of South America, touching weekly at the ports of the United States, and bi-monthly traversing the Indian Ocean-tracking, in fact, the face of the deep wherever England has great interests or her sons have many friends. Even the vast Pacific, which a hundred years ago was rarely penetrated even by the adventurous

circumnavigator, has become a highway for the passage of her Majesty's mails; and letters pass to Australia and New Zealand, our very antipodes, as soon as the epistles of old reached the Highlands of Scotland or the western counties of Ireland. This vast system of water-posts, if so they might be called, is kept up at an annual expense of over £1,000,000 sterling.

The conveyance of inland letters by means of the railways is comparatively inexpensive, as many of the companies are liberal enough to take the bags at rates usually charged to the public for parcels; the total cost for their carriage in 1854 being only £446,000. Every night and morning, like so much life-blood issuing from a great heart, the mails leave the metropolis, radiating on their fire-chariots to the extremities of the land. As they rush along, the work of digestion goes on as in the flying bird. The travelling post-office is not the least of those curious contrivances for saving time consequent upon the introduction of railroads. At the metropolitan stations from which they issue, a letter-box is open until the last moment of their departure. The last letters into it are, of course, unsorted, and have to go through that process as the train proceeds. Whilst the clerks are busy in their itinerant office, by an ingenious, self-acting process, a delivery and reception of mail-bags is going on over their heads. At the smaller stations, where the trains do not stop, the letter-bags are lightly hung upon rods, which are swept by the passing mail-carriage, and the letters drop into a net suspended on one side of it to receive them. The bags for delivery are, at the same moment, transferred from the other side to the platform. The sorting of the

newly-received bags immediately commences, and by this arrangement letters are caught in transitu, sorted, arranged in districts, ready to be transferred to the district offices in the metropolis, without the trouble and loss of time attendant upon the old mail-coach system, which necessitated the carriage of the major part of such letters to St. Martin's-le-Grand previous to their final despatch.

There have been a great number of pillar and wall letterboxes erected since they were first introduced about four years ago, and the plan is found to be so convenient and economical that their erection continues at the rate of about 500 a year. In most cases, the public prefer these pillarboxes to receiving houses, as their letters are safe from the scrutiny of curious post-mistresses and their gossips.

The success of Sir Rowland Hill's system, with its double delivery, its rapid transmissions, and its great cheapness, which brings it within the range of the very poorest, is fast becoming apparent. Year by year it is increasing the amount of revenue it returns to the State, its profits for 1859 being £1,135,960, a falling off, it is true, of some £500,000 a year from the revenue derived under the old rates, but every day it is catching up this income, and another ten years of but average prosperity will, in all probability, place it far beyond its old receipts, with a tenfold amount of accommodation and cheapness to the public. As it is, the gross earnings have already done so by nearly £250,000 a year; but the cost of distribution has, of course, vastly augmented with the great increase of letters which pass through the post under the penny

rate.

LONDON SMOKE.

ALL those who have experienced the depressing effects of a November day, and have seen the atmosphere without a moment's warning put on the changeable complexion of a very bad bruise, and then resolve itself into a dull, leaden, hopeless hue, for the rest of the day, can readily understand the fixed belief of the Parisian that in that month Cockneys give themselves up to suicide, and leap in a constant stream from London-bridge. Indeed, a countryman from the breezy South Downs, or from any country village where the air "recommends itself nimbly to the senses," may well feel his heart sink within him as he looks up in vain for the blue sky, and sees nothing but that solemn gray canopy of vapour which sits like an incubus

on the whole town.

It may be said that it is unfair to take a November fog as offering any specimen of the atmospheric impurities in the midst of which we live. It may be so, but we look upon fogs as providential inflictions, which at certain times in the year seize for our special edification, as it were, the offending elements, and exhibit them under our eyes and noses, in order to show us what filth we are con

tinually throwing into the air, and which as continually returns, although in not quite so demonstrative a manner.

Smoke we have always with us. If we look out on a fine summer's day from the top of the Crystal Palace for a view of the great metropolis, we naturally exclaim, "I see it; there is the smoke;" indeed, any picture of London without its dim canopy of soot would be as unrecognizable as would a portrait of Pope, Hogarth, or Cowper, without their well-known headgear.

This black and heavy cloud is supported by the 500,000 or 600,000 columns of smoke that arise from the 400,000 houses of London. In it we behold the great aërial coalfield, which contains annually no less than 200,000 tons of fuel that escapes from us up our chimneys. Escapes, did we say? Oh that it did, and that we never heard or saw more of it; but smoke, like a chicken, still returns to roost.

We do not allude to "those horrid blacks" that dance and waltz before our very eyes, and then maliciously plump down upon the ample page of some fine edition, or "squat" deliberately upon the most delicate distance of a sketch by Copley Fielding or Cox, but to those finer blacklets that invisibly permeate the air. If we look at any fracture through which a draught penetrates, a cracked window or a shrunken skirtingboard, we shall find that the edges are ragged, with a fine fringe of soot pointing towards the fireplace; this fact alone is enough to demonstrate that the air is charged both inside and outside our houses with a vast amount of infinitely divided carbon. If it is deposited in this manner by the mere friction of passing any object, we may imagine what irritation it must occasion to