to be seen of the vast tide rolling along so incessantly a short time ago. Across the glass-like lake the waterfowl, here and there, are gently sailing, leaving long trails of silver as they go. Over the bridge the foliage seems to float in a bath of purple haze, and across the deep amber of the sky a flight of wildfowl go, in swiftly moving line. Danby should be here to paint from it one of his delicious pictures of evening.

THE SUCTION POST.

ONE great invention draws others in its train. The locomotive necessitated the telegraph, and with the telegraph we have grown dissatisfied with our whole postal system. We can converse with each other at opposite ends of the kingdom, yet a letter will sometimes take half a day journeying from one extremity of the metropolis to the other. Our great nerves and arteries (the telegraphic and railway systems) put the four corners of the earth in speedy communication with each other, considering the hundreds of millions of square miles they serve; but the central heart, London, is a blank in the general system, and the utmost speed with which its distances can be travelled is measured by the pace of a Hansom cab. Three millions of people are naturally dissatisfied with this state of things, and busy brains are hard at work attempting to remedy it. At the present moment, in fact, there is a race to lay down a metropolitan nervous system. If the reader happens to go into the City, he sees above the house-tops and across the river science weaving a vast spider's web from point to point. The sky is gradually becoming laced with telegraph wires, along which messages

These

of love, of greed, of commerce, speed unseen. wires belong to the District Telegraphic Company, and perform the office of putting public offices in communication with each other, of supplying the nervous system between the Docks and the Exchange, carrying the news of the moment and the price of stocks from the countinghouse of the merchant to his snuggery far down in the country, hard beside some railway. But the spider's web is also extending beneath our feet; if we take up the flags, there too we find the fine filaments traversing in their iron sheaths, linking railway station to railway station, and speeding the message under the feet of millions from one telegraphic line to another. With all these facilities for forwarding urgent messages between given points, however, the town still wants some rapid augmentation of its ordinary carrying system. We are going to shoot passengers from point to point by means of a subterraneous railway. Shall letters and parcels still toilfully pursue their way, urged by sorry screws and weary postmen? Or shall we not harness another power of Nature to relieve our toil?

When a lounger on a very hot day sits down under an awning, and goes to work upon his sherry-cobbler, he notes with satisfaction how immediately and how smoothly the liquor glides up the straw upon the application of his lips to it. But the odds are that he never associated with this movement the Post Office or the London Parcels Delivery Company in any manner whatever. Yet, if we are not greatly mistaken, the power at work in that straw is destined to revolutionize the machinery of those very important metropolitan associa

tions. There are some people perverse enough to turn the dislikes of others to their own special profit. Now a company has been formed, and is in actual working, to take advantage of a special dislike of Nature. We all know that our great mother abhors a vacuum; but the Pneumatic Despatch Company, on the contrary, very much admires it, inasmuch as they see in it their way to a vast public benefit and profit to themselves.

For some years the International Telegraph Company have employed this new power to expedite their own business. Thus their chief office at Lothbury has been for some time put in communication with the Stock Exchange and their stations at Cornhill and Mincing Lane, and written messages are sucked through tubes, thus avoiding the necessity of repeating each message. We witnessed the apparatus doing its ordinary work only the other day in the large telegraphic apartment of the company in Telegraph Street, Moorgate Street. Five metal tubes, of from two to three inches in diameter, are seen trained against the wall, and coming to an abrupt termination opposite the seat of the attendant who ministers to them. In connection with their butt-ends other smaller pipes are soldered on at right angles; these lead down to an air-pump below, worked by a small steam-engine. There is another air-pump and engine, of course, at the other end of the pipe, and thus suction is established to and fro through its whole length. Whilst we are looking at the largest pipe we hear a whistle; this is to give notice that a despatch is about to be put into the tube at Mincing Lane, two-thirds of a mile distant. It will be necessary therefore to exhaust the air between the end we

are watching and that point. A little trap-door-the mouth of the apparatus is instantly shut, a cock is turned, the air-pump below begins to suck, and in a few seconds you hear a soft thud against the end of the tube -the little door is opened, and a cylinder of gutta-percha encased in flannel, about four inches long, which fits the tube, but loosely, is immediately ejected upon the counter; the cylinder is opened at one end, and there we find the despatch.

Now it is quite clear that it is only necessary to enlarge the tubes and to employ more powerful engines and airpumps in order to convey a thousand letters and despatches, book parcels, &c., in the same manner. And this the company are forthwith about to do. They propose in their prospectus to unite all the district post-offices in the metropolis with the central office in St. Martin's-le-Grand. We particularly beg the attention of the indignant suburban gentleman who is always writing to the Times respecting the delays which take place in the delivery of district letters, to this scheme. At present a letter is longer going from one of the outer circles of the post-office delivery to one of the inner ones than from London to Brighton; but with the working of the Pneumatic Despatch Company a totally different state of things will obtain. An obvious reason of the present delay is the crowded state of the London thoroughfares, which obstructs the mail-carts in their passage to the central office, or from district to district; another reason is that, from the very nature of things, letters are by the present system only despatched at intervals of two or three hours. But when we have Eolus to do our work the letters will flow towards headquarters for sorting and further distribution incessantly.