In the course of the trial it was proved that the deputy was guilty, certain of the missing letters having been found in his house, and the son had already confessed to what was charged against him. The whole cases were clearly made out to the satisfaction of the jury, who returned a verdict accordingly against both prisoners, but with a recommendation of mercy towards the son of the deputy, on the score of his tender years. Sentence was pronounced on the 5th September, and the date of execution fixed for the 18th October. By the exercise of the Royal prerogative, George III. granted a free pardon to the deputy's son, who was forthwith set at liberty; but it is a melancholy reflection, that for delinquencies involving the loss of so small a sum as £9, the deputy-postmaster should, on the date fixed for his execution, have actually been led forth to his doom. In a report of the circumstance written at the time, it is stated "that he was attended by the Rev. Mr Black of Lady Yester's, and Mr Struthers of the Relief congregation, and behaved in a manner suitable to his unhappy situation!" God forbid that there should be a standard of deportment for occasions like this, where, to our more humane notions, the punishment so fearfully outweighs the offence.
Early in the year 1849 a sad blow fell upon the postmaster of a certain town in Wales, on its being discovered that an assistant in his office, a daughter of his own, had been stealing post-letters. In the course of investigations made into her misdoings, it was discovered that the thefts had been going on for a period of seven years, during which time she had accumulated as much jewellery and haberdashery as would have stocked a small shop—and besides, money to the amount of £95. The letters from which theproperty had been taken were between two and three hundred, and these she had kept, so that it was possible to restore to the owners, in many cases, the stolen articles. On the 20th March the unfortunate and misguided creature was tried, on the charge of stealing a particular letter, and was convicted—the sentence passed upon her beingtransportation for ten years.
It was afterwards ascertained that the motive underlying this long career of thieving was a desire to amass such a dowry as would improve her prospects in the matter of obtaining a husband.
Hatton Garden Robbery.
On Thursday the 16th November 1881, the whole country was made aware, through the daily papers, that a most daring Post-office robbery had been committed in London the previous afternoon, the scene of the event being the Hatton Garden Branch Office, situated in the busy district of Holborn. The time and plan of carrying out the undertaking were not such as are usually chosen for attempts of this kind, the hour at which the robbery was effected being 5p.m., when the office was thronged with the public purchasing stamps, or doing other business in view of the night-mail despatch. Nor was there any furtive mode of proceeding in the ordinary sense, but a bold and dashing stroke for the chances of success or failure.
On the afternoon of the day of the robbery, a murky fog, such as Londoners know so well and heartily dislike, hung over the metropolis. The street lamps afforded but a dull light in the thoroughfares; shops and offices were lighted up for the evening's business; and the afternoon's work in the Hatton Garden Post-office was at its height (the registered-letter bag, containing some forty registered letters,having just been deposited in an ordinary bag hanging from a peg in the office), when suddenly, and without apparent cause, the whole of the lights in the office went out, and the place was plunged in almost total darkness. Consternation took possession of the female clerks behind the counter, while young clerks and boys from warehouses and offices, conceiving the occasion to be one for noise and merriment, helped to increase the confusion by clamour and hubbub outside the counter. No long time elapsed before matches were obtained and tapers lit, when it was immediately discovered that the tap of the gas-meter in the basement had been turned off; but on the tap being turned on again, the jets in the office were relit, and the place resumed its wonted appearance. The young ladies in the office being now able to see around them, soon detected the absence of the bag, which had been left hanging on the peg, and which they knew had not yet been despatched by them. It did not take long to realise that the bag had vanished—in fact, had been stolen; and to this day the property contained in the lost registered letters has not been recovered, nor have the persons concerned in the theft been traced.
It is believed that two or more individuals were engaged in the robbery, the supposition being that one person got down into the basement without attracting attention, and turned off the gas, while another, so soon as darkness supervened, got by some means within the counter, and, unobserved, took the bag from the peg—all concerned making good their escape in the midst of the stir and noise by which they were surrounded. The whole adventure bears the impress of having been carefully planned and cleverly executed, and there is little doubt that the robbery was carried out by men who were experts in their nefarious calling.
The value of the articles contained in the forty registeredletters was about £15,000; and as the scene of the robbery lay in the midst of diamond merchants and jewellers, it is not surprising that precious stones and jewellery were the principal contents of these letters. Besides watches, bracelets set with pearls and diamonds, ear-rings, rings, &c., the following articles were among the property stolen—viz., eight parcels of rough diamonds, 147 turquoises, a quantity of small emeralds, 6000 drilled sapphires, 2000 pairs of garnet bores, 240 pairs of sapphire bores, a quantity of sapphires weighing 695 carats, several rubies and sapphires weighing 546 carats, &c., &c.
A reward of £200 was offered by the Postmaster-General, and a further reward of £1000 by certain insurance companies who had insured the valuable letters, for the conviction of the delinquents and the recovery of the stolen property; but the robbery remains to this day one of those which have baffled the skill of the Metropolitan police and the officers of the Post-office to unravel or to bring home to the evil-doers.
Cape Diamond Robbery.
The greater portion of the diamonds found in Griqualand West, in South Africa, are sent weekly to England through the Post-office, made up in packets, which are forwarded as registered letters—the value of these remittances being collectively from £60,000 to £100,000. In April 1880, the sailing of the mail-steamer from Cape Town having been delayed until the day after the arrival of the up-country mails, the bag containing the registered correspondence was left in the registered-letter office of the Cape Town Post-office; not, however, locked up in the safe, where it ought to have been, but carelessly left underneath one of the tables. During the night the office was broken into,and the whole of the diamonds stolen, valued at £60,000. Who the robbers were appears never to have been discovered, and they have doubtless since been in the enjoyment of the fruits of their villainous enterprise. As it is the practice of people in the diamond trade to insure packets of diamonds sent by them, the senders did not suffer anything beyond inconvenience by this robbery; but the insurance companies were involved in the loss, and had to pay claims amounting to £60,000.
The following is an account of a robbery attempted upon a postman in London in July 1847, as officially reported at the time:—
"An attempt was this morning made to murder or seriously to maim Bradley, the Lombard Street letter-carrier, with a view of obtaining possession of the letters for his district. He was passing through Mitre Court, a narrow passage between Wood Street and Milk Street, when the gate of the Court was closed and locked behind him with a skeleton key by, it is believed, three men, who followed him a few yards farther on in the passage. On Bradley getting to a wider part of the Court, one of them felled him to the ground by a heavy blow from a life-preserver; he attempted to rise, but was again knocked down in a similar manner. He then felt that they tried to force from him his letter-bags, but fortunately the mouths of them were, for security, twisted round his arm. They continued their blows; but Bradley retained sufficient consciousness to call out 'Murder!' so as to be heard by some of the porters in the adjoining warehouses, who ran to see what was the matter, but unluckily the villains escaped. Poor Bradley is most seriously injured—so much so that he may be considered in some danger."
An idea of the amount of property the thieves wouldhave obtained had Bradley not held the bags tightly (even under such circumstances), may be formed from the fact that he had in his possession thirty-seven registered letters containing property, besides all the other letters for Messrs Overend, Gurney, & Co., Robarts, Curtis, & Co., Glynn & Co., the London and County Bank, as well as those for thirty-four other houses in Lombard Street. It was believed at the time that the value of the property in Bradley's possession amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
A daring robbery of a Berlin postman occurred not very long ago, when the outrage was accompanied by a still more atrocious crime—the murder of the postman. The man was one of a class who deliver money remittances at the addresses of the persons to whom they are sent, under a system which prevails in some countries of the Continent, and he had with him cash and notes to the amount of some £1500. The robber and murderer, a man of great bodily strength, had so arranged that a small remittance would fall to be delivered at his address on Monday morning—an occasion when a large number of remittances are received; and on the postman reaching the place, and proceeding to pay the requisite sum, the occupier of the premises felled him with a hammer, and with repeated blows killed him outright. It was evident from the circumstances that the murderer had duly planned the outrage, for the room rented was near to the starting-point of the postman, so that he should not have paid away any portion of his charge when he reached the room. The body of the poor postman was found afterwards cold and stiff, lying in a pool of blood, with his empty and rifled bag beside him; and the weapon with which the perpetrator had achieved the murder, remained there as a witness of the crime. The murderer was said to have previously served in a cuirassier regiment. Before decamping, he had turned the key in the door ofhis room; and the discovery was only made after a search by the Post-office authorities at the addresses at which the postman had to call, on his failing to return later in the day.
Some years ago the following extensive robbery of letters occurred in London. An unusually large number of complaints were found to be reaching the General Post-office, of the non-receipt by merchants, bankers, and others carrying on business in Lombard Street and its neighbourhood, of letters containing bank-notes, cheques, advices, and important correspondence, sent to them from all parts of the kingdom. The circumstance naturally gave rise to careful inquiry on the part of the Post-office authorities, with the result that suspicion fell upon a young postman of nineteen years of age, through whose hands many of the missing letters would in ordinary course have to pass. Certain Bank of England notes, which had been contained in some of the letters, were found to have been cashed; and the names endorsed upon them, though fictitious, were in a handwriting resembling that of the young man suspected. Thereupon he was arrested and searched, when in a pocketbook on his person were found two £5 notes, which had been forwarded from Norfolk to a banking-house in London, but had failed to reach their destination. In a pocket in his official coat were found also some thirty-five letters of various dates, which he had neglected to deliver, to the inconvenience or loss no doubt of the persons addressed; but the most astonishing part of the business is, that when his locker or cupboard at the General Post-office was examined, about 1500 letters were found there which he had stopped, the dates upon the envelopes showing that his delinquencies had extended over several months. This young man, upon being tried for the offences named, was convicted, and with the usual severity observed in similarcircumstances, the judge passed upon the prisoner a sentence of six years' penal servitude.
The following curious instance of the wholesale misappropriation of post-letters also came under the notice of the Post-office authorities in London a few years ago:—
A man was observed one day carrying off some boards from a building in course of erection in the Wandsworth Bridge Road, Fulham, and being pursued by a constable, he dropped the timber and made off. The man was, however, captured and taken to the police-station, whereupon the place where he lived was searched for other stolen property. His habitation was situated upon a waste piece of ground on the banks of the Thames, the erection being of wood built upon piles, and so placed as to be almost entirely surrounded by water. Here this man, who was a barge-owner, and who was passing under an assumed name, had lived in isolation for about a year; the position selected for his home being one calculated to afford him that complete seclusion from social intercourse which would seem to have been his aim. In the course of their examination of the contents of the hut, the police found not only more stolen timber, but various other articles, the chief of which, in the present connection, were a large lot of post-letters, mail-bags, and articles of postmen's clothing, besides milk-cans and a case of forty rifles. As the inquiry proceeded, it became known that the prisoner was a Post-office pensioner, having been superannuated from his office of postman some three years previously, after having served in that capacity a period of fifteen years. It would seem that his official delinquencies had extended over some six or eight years; but so far as the letters showed, theft in the ordinary sense could hardly have been the man's purpose, inasmuch as the letters had not been opened, with one exception, and in this instance the person for whom the letter was intended couldnot be found. The motive underlying this free departure from the ways of honesty seems to have had its root in simple acquisitiveness; the hundredweight of letters, book-packets, &c., the old mail-bags, discarded uniforms, and waste official papers (not to mention the thirty milk-cans, supposed to have been picked up when going his rounds as a postman, and the case of rifles), having been turned to no profitable account. Had the superannuated postman opened the letters found in his premises, the punishment which would have followed would necessarily have been severe. As the case stood, however, he was merely charged under the Post-office Acts with their unlawful detention, and sentence was passed upon him of eighteen months' imprisonment with hard labour. It seems astonishing that this postman should have had the folly to retain about him so long the evidences of his errors, which might at any time have been brought up against him; but, perhaps, the feeling prompting this may be akin to that which leads criminals to visit the scenes of former iniquities, even when incurring the risk of discovery, and if discovered, of certain punishment.
The following is a case of robbery which occurred in 1883, as reported by the newspapers of the day, the culprit being quite a young person:—
"The most destructive and important case of robbery in connection with Mr Fawcett's plan, introduced some two or three years ago, for facilitating the placing of small sums, by means of postage-stamps, in the Post-office Savings Bank, came before the Bristol magistrates to-day, when Ellen Hunt, a domestic servant, about sixteen years of age, was charged with stealing a large number of letters, some of them containing cheques, the property of the Postmaster-General. Mr Clifton, who prosecuted, said the robberies were of a very extensive character, and might have beenfraught with the direst consequences. They had been discovered in a singular manner, no money having been missed: but a large number of circular letters, addressed by the Bristol clerk to officials requiring to be sworn in connection with the School Board election this week, miscarried. Inquiries were made by the Postal authorities, when it was found that all these circulars had been posted at the Redcliffe district office, where the prisoner was the servant of the postmaster, Mr Devine. It was the custom of Mr Devine to place the key of the letter-box in a secret place for the use of himself and his assistants; but the prisoner discovered it, and the circular letters were found in her possession with the postage-stamps off them. They had been removed for payment into the Post-office Savings Bank on the forms by which a shilling's worth of postage-stamps saved up by school-children and others is now accepted by the Savings Bank department of the Post-office; but the most serious part of the case was the fact that in the prisoner's box were discovered the bundles of opened letters now produced by Detective Short, and containing cheques already discovered to the amount of £74, 16s., all of which had been sent through the same Post-office. The charge was laid under the 27th section of the Act, but formerly a prisoner would have been liable for such an offence to transportation for life. Some evidence having been given, the girl, who was hysterical throughout the hearing, was remanded. Apparently no effort had been made to deal with the cheques, but the detective stated that the numerous letters had been opened."
Tale of a Banker's Letter.
Towards the close of last century, or early in the present century, a tradesman of the better class carrying on businessin a certain town of the west of England, which we shall here call X——, and who also added to his ordinary business that of the agency of a bank, posted a bulky letter containing heavy remittances in notes, addressed to the Bank of England. This letter never reached its destination, and the loss, being of a most serious kind, was soon bruited about, and became the theme, locally, of general conversation. As it happened, the sender was a man of strong political opinions, and having courage to express them, there were many persons holding opposite views who not only regarded him with feelings akin to dislike, but were ready to take up any missile which chance might place in their way to damage their adversary's fair name. While, therefore, the bank agent maintained that he had posted the letter in question, insinuations were set afloat to the effect that he had not done so, and that the object of his allegations was to fend off pressing calls in matters of account. He suffered greatly in reputation from these unsupported stories, though there was nothing else in his circumstances to create suspicion. Time, the great anodyne of scandal, had somewhat assuaged the sufferings of the unfortunate banker, and probably softened the unkind feelings of those who had been disposed to think hardly of him; the loss of the letter itself had ceased to attract attention; and as yet nothing was heard of the letter, or the valuable enclosures which it had contained.
At length, however, the agent received intimation that one of the missing notes—a Bank of England note for £50—which wasstoppedat that establishment, had been presented in London. As the result of inquiries which were made, it was now traced to an old-established silversmith somewhere in the city of London; but beyond this point the search failed, for all the account the silversmithcould give was, that he had received the note some time previously from a man of respectable appearance, who had the exterior and conversation of what might be a well-to-do west-country farmer. This man was accompanied to his shop by a young woman of the flash type, to whom the stranger presented two or three rings; purchasing for himself some heavy gold seals, such as were in vogue at the period, a silver tankard or two, and several punch-ladles. In payment of these articles the £50 note was passed, but the silversmith could give no further help; though hope was not yet extinct, for he added that he should certainly recognise his customers, were they ever to come under his observation again.
The man of X—— was a man of determination, and, still smarting under the loss of means and honour, he resolved that, sooner or later, he should discover by whom his letter had been stolen. The silversmith, readily entering into these views, cordially offered his personal services, and it was arranged between the banker and himself that they should ransack London, visiting the Ranelahs, the Vauxhalls, the Parks, the theatres—indeed every place where gay women and men of pleasure might be found together. This was an arduous task; but in the end their perseverance was rewarded by the discovery of the young woman to whom the farmer had presented the rings. On being questioned, this young person, while frankly stating what she knew, had little to tell. She had, she said, been in Snow Hill or Holborn one morning at the hour of the arrival of the west of England mail-coach. Among the passengers who got down was a youngish, fresh-looking farmer, whose acquaintance she then made, and whose constant companion she was for several days thereafter. She still wore the articles of jewellery which had been presented to her; but she declared that she had never seenthe man since, nor did she know his name. And here the inquiry again seemed to exhaust itself, in the vague discovery of awest-country farmer.
The acquaintance between the banker and the silversmith, which had come about in the way already stated, soon ripened into friendship. They had, in a greater or less degree, a common interest in the matter of the stolen note, but they soon found out that there was other common ground for the growth of amity between them—they were both disciples of Izaak Walton. It became the custom of the silversmith to visit at the house of his friend in the west every season, when the two men would go out fishing together in the neighbouring streams, enjoying each other's society, and frequently, no doubt, going over again the old story of the lost letter. One day, during such a visit, the silversmith went out alone to try a stream not many miles distant from his friend's residence, and while so engaged a heavy shower swept across the scene. The angler sought shelter in a roadside inn, from which, as it happened, he was not far distant. The house was well known, and the proprietor was of the half-farmer, half-publican type, the business of innkeeper in such a situation not affording a sufficient living by itself. Feeling somewhat peckish, the visitor called for lunch. He was waited upon by the landlord in person. While the bread and cheese and cider were being carried in, the landlord apologised for the absence of the female folks, who were for the moment engaged elsewhere; and during this brief conversation, the silversmith (still instinct with professional taste) studied a bunch of heavy seals hanging from a watch in the landlord's fob. The landlord perceived that these articles had attracted the stranger's notice, and when he again came into the room the fact was observed by theother that they had been left aside or placed out of sight.
This incident set the stranger thinking; and while so engaged, his eye fell upon an old-fashioned glass-fronted cupboard occupying a corner of the room, in which were exhibited the inn treasures—old crystal vessels, china bowls, and the like—together with the plate of the establishment. A sudden thought struck him. He proceeded to examine the contents of the repository; and, standing upon a chair to explore the upper shelves, what was his amazement when he there recognised the silver tankards and the silver punch-ladles which he had sold to the west-country farmer many years before! Then, eagerly turning over the whole matter in his mind, the features of the landlord came back upon him, and in this man he recognised the person who in London had purchased these articles and paid to him the stolen £50 Bank of England note. The silversmith lost no time in communicating the facts to the banker, who at once obtained a warrant, and, with two constables, proceeded the same evening to the inn to put it into execution. The landlord was called into a room, there and then he was charged with having stolen the note, and was forthwith conveyed into X—— a prisoner.
It transpired in the course of inquiries that in his early days—before the period of the robbery—this man had been employed as a servant or assistant by the postmaster at X——. He left that situation, however, and became coachman to one of the neighbouring gentry. While in this service it was very frequently his duty to drive the family into town, where they would rest some portion of the day in their town house, and return to the country seat in the evening. In these intervals it sometimes happened that the coachman would go to the Post-office, and therechat and gossip with his old fellow-servants. He visited the Post-office on the day when the stolen letter was posted; he and his former comrades smoked and drank together; and in the end he volunteered to assist with the letters. He did so; and while thus engaged he managed to abstract the banker's letter, which, owing to its bulky nature and the address which it bore, he suspected to contain value. His visit on that particular day was verified by circumstances in the recollection of the persons at the Post-office, and other evidence of his guilt accumulated against him; but this testimony was not really necessary, for the farmer-publican himself confessed to the theft of the letter, and explained how he had obtained possession of it.
The course usual in such circumstances followed. The offence was visited with the severity which characterised the period—the man suffered the extreme penalty of the law.
Although the work of sending and receiving telegraphic messages may be regarded in a general way as partaking largely of a merely mechanical nature, yet it is work to which the operator who is to achieve credit in his sphere must bring much tact, good sense, intelligence, a knowledge of the world, and a considerable amount of patience. Not only are the terms in which telegrams are frequently written so far devoid of context in themselves, owing to the curt way in which they are worded, as to render the sense of little assistance in estimating the correctness of a message received, but the letters of the telegraphic alphabet, being nothing more than little groups of dots and dashes variously arranged, are extremely susceptible of mutilation, owing to any lack of exact spacing on the part of the sending operator. Nor does the liability to error lie only in these directions. The dots and dashes frequently fail or run together, owing either to feeble signals, contact of the wires with one another, with trees, or other objects, or to the instruments not being in perfect adjustment. A grain of grit or of dust getting between the points of contact in a delicate instrument will sometimes do much mischief in the way indicated. There is liability to mistakes, too, in consequence of the handwriting of the senders, or of the operators at a transmitting point where messages have to be again taken down, not being very plain. Yet over and above these tendencies to error, there is the fallibility of human nature, which will sometimes lead a person to write "no" where "yes" is intended, or "black" where "white" is meant; and of such mistakes probably no explanation can be given. So that the work of a telegraphist is beset with pitfalls, and he requires all his wits and a fair share of intelligence to keep him right in his work. It may further be remarked that many errors in telegrams, which might be supposed by the public to be gross or inexcusable, have occurred in the most simple way, or have been shown to be due to failures of a very trifling kind.
The following are illustrations of such mistakes:—
A pleasure-party, telegraphing to some friends, stated that they had "arrived all right," but the message was rendered, "We have arrived all tight." The words "right" and "tight" in the Morse code are as follows:—
In another case, a poor person, desiring to state that her daughter was ill, wrote in her message, "Mary is bad." This was rendered, "Mary is dead," the sense being changed by a slight imperfection of spacing, thus—
instead of—
In a third case, owing to failing signals, possibly from sosimple a cause as the intermittent contact of the wire with a wet branch of a tree, or a particle of grit or dust finding its way between the points of the instrument, the import of the message was altogether changed. Thus, "Alfred doing well, enjoyed egg to-day," was received, "Alfred dying, enjoyed GG to-day."
A gentleman telegraphed from London to his brother in the country to send a hack to meet him at the station; but when the gentleman arrived at the station he found asackwaiting for him. A firm in London telegraphed, "Send rails ten foot lengths;" but the message was delivered, "Send rails in foot lengths."
A person telegraphed to a friend to "take two stalls at the Haymarket," but the message conveyed directions to secure "two stables at the Haymarket." In another telegram, the intimation, "mother is no worse," was changed to "mother is no more." Again, "You will be glad to hear that your sister has accepted an engagement with your father's approval," was rendered, "that your sister has accepted an engagement with your father's apostle." In another case a plain business message, thus—"Come to me as early as you can, that we may arrange Wednesday," was given a matrimonial turn by being delivered as, "that we may arrange wedding." The next case is one in which a hungry man would doubtless be made an angry man in consequence of the mistake which occurred. His message, which was written thus,—"Shall arrive by train to-morrowmorning; provide a goodsupplyof bread, butter, eggs, milk, and potatoes,"—was delivered as "provide a goodsupperof bread," &c. In another instance the notice that "Mr —— will come to-night with me at 7 to tea," was rendered, "Mr —— will come to-night with me, get 7 to tea;" the only argument in favour of the mistake being "the more the merrier." Then, on another occasion, atelegram sent by a person in the country to "Madame ——, Costumier," at an address in London, conveying an order for a fancy dress, was presented to the maker of costumes as "Madame ——, Costermonger." In a telegram directed to "——, M.P., House of Commons," the address somehow got changed to "——, M.P., House of Correction;" but the member not being found there, the clerks at the delivering office suggested that it should be tried at the "House of Detention,"—a not unlikely place for successful delivery of such a message as things were at the time.
It has been left to America to produce a mistake in telegraphing which, while it is very amusing, could not result in hurt or disappointment to any one. Here it is, just as received from the other side of the "ferry":—
A St Louis merchant, while in New York, received a telegram notifying that his wife was ill. He sent a message to his family doctor asking the nature of the sickness, and if there was any danger, and promptly received the answer "No danger; your wife has had a child; if we can keep her from having another to-night she will do well." The mystification of the agitated husband was not removed until a second inquiry revealed the fact that his indisposed lady had had achill.
In dealing with the vast numbers of letters and other post articles which daily flow through the capacious veins of the British Post-office, the officials of the department come to learn many strange things connected with the wanderings of letters from their proper courses; they learn much in regard to the blunders made by the senders of letters in writing their addresses, and of the supreme folly frequently shown by individuals in transmitting valuables in carelessly-made-up packets; and this experience not only has the effect of causing complaints made by the public to be sometimes met by doubts and misgivings on the part of the Post-office, but is of great use in tracing home the blame to the right quarter, which is found to be, not infrequently, where the complainer had least reason to suspect it. The following facts will probably establish what is here advanced, besides proving of interest to the reader.
It is quite a common occurrence for letters—especially letters of a small size—which are dropped into a letter-box, to slip inside newspapers or book-packets, and to be carried, not only out of their proper course, but to places abroad, thus getting into the hands of the wrong persons. Such letters are returned from time to time from every quarterof the globe, but what proportion of those which go astray are duly returned it is impossible to say; for there are persons who, on receiving letters in this way not intended for them, proceed to open the envelopes through sheer curiosity, and having thus violated the letters, do not hesitate to destroy them. Others again, through dishonest motives, open letters of this class in the hope of gain. But there are others who, through no such interest, but merely from the want of a neighbourly spirit, refuse to take any trouble to put an errant letter in its proper course. This spirit was displayed in the case of a letter which had been misdelivered by the postman at a given address on the first floor of a tenement (it being intended for a person occupying the ground floor), the person who had received it stating, when questioned, that he had torn up the letter because he would not be troubled to send it downstairs! Letters are sometimes, too, carried away to wrong addresses by sticking to the backs of other letters.
Again, through a great want of sense, or perhaps a redundancy of stupidity, letters are deposited occasionally in the most extraordinary places, in the idea that they are being posted. A servant-girl being sent out to post a letter, drops it into the letter-box of an empty shop, where it is found when an intending tenant goes to look at the premises. In a town in the north of Scotland a person was observed to deposit a letter in a disused street hydrant, and on the cover of the box being removed, three other letters were found, the senders of which had similarly mistaken the water-pillar for a letter-box. The letters had been passed into the box through the space formerly occupied by the tap-lever. A somewhat similarly absurd thing happened some time ago in Liverpool, where two letters were observed to have been forced behind the plate indicating the hours of collection on a pillar letter-box—the person who hadplaced them there no doubt thinking he was doing the correct thing.
It must be that many individuals entertain the greatest confidence in the servants of the Post-office, or they would not send money and valuables as they do. They also, perhaps, regard the Department as a fit subject on which to perpetrate petty frauds, by sending things of intrinsic value enclosed in books and newspapers. Instances of this kind are frequent.
Within the folds of a newspaper addressed to a person in Ireland were found two sovereigns, yet there was no writing to show who the sender was.
A brown-paper parcel, merely tied with string, unsealed, and not even registered, was found to contain six sovereigns, one half-crown, two sixpences, and three halfpenny-pieces, wrapped up in small articles of ladies' dress.
In the chief office in London, two gold watches were found inside an unregistered book-packet addressed to New Zealand, the middle portions of the leaves having been cut out so as to admit of the watches being concealed within. On another occasion, but in a Scotch Post-office, a packet containing a book bound in morocco, was on examination discovered to have the inner portion of the leaves hollowed out, while still retaining the appearance of an ordinary book, and inside this hollow were found secreted a gold watch and a silver locket. At another time, a £20 Bank of England note was observed pinned to one of the pages of a book addressed to the initials of a lady at a receiving-house in the London Metropolitan District.
A packet done up in a piece of brown paper, unsealed, but tied with string, was found to contain a small quantity of trimming, a collar-box with a few paper-collars, and inside the box were two £1 notes and 10s. in silver. A halfpenny wrapper was used to serve as a covering for thetransmission of a letter, a bill of sale, and four £5 Bank of England notes. In a newspaper which reached the Dead-letter Office were found four sovereigns, and in another a gold locket. A packet carelessly rolled up was seen to contain a sovereign, two half-sovereigns, and a savings-bank book. In several instances coins have been found imbedded in cake and pieces of toast; and on one occasion gold coins of the value of £1, 10s. were discovered in a large seal at the back of a letter, the gold pieces having come to light through the wax getting slightly chipped. But the most flattering act of confidence in the probity of the Post-office fell to be performed by a person at Leeds, who, desiring to send a remittance to a friend, folded a five-pound note in two, wrote the address on the back of it, and, without cover or registration, consigned it to the letter-box. Petty frauds are committed on the Post-office to a large extent by the senders of newspapers, who infringe the rules by enclosing all sorts of things between the leaves—such as cigars and tobacco, collars, sea-weed, ferns and flowers, gloves, handkerchiefs, music, patterns, sermons, stockings, postage-stamps, and so on. People in the United States and Canada are much given to these practices, as shown by the fact that in one-half of the year 1874, more than 14,000 newspapers were detected with such articles secreted in them.
Occasionally letters of great value are very carelessly treated after delivery, through misconception as to what they really are. A person alleging that a registered letter containing a number of Suez Canal coupons had not reached him, the Post-office was able to prove its delivery; and on search being then made in the premises of the addressee, the coupons were found in the waste-paper basket, where they had been thrown under the idea that they were circulars. In another instance a registered letter, containing Turkish bondswith coupons payable to bearer, was misdirected to and delivered at an address in the west end of London, though it was really intended for a firm in the city. The value of the enclosures was more than £4000. When inquiry came to be made at the place of delivery, it was found that the bonds had been mistaken for foreign lottery-tickets of no value, and were put aside for the children of the family to play with.
Cases come to light, too, involving a history—or at least suggesting a history without affording particulars—or leaving us entirely in the dark as to the circumstances of the matter. Thus, two packets which had been addressed to Australia, and had been forwarded thither, were returned to England with the mark upon them, "unclaimed." On being opened, one of them was found to contain 100 sovereigns, and the other 50 sovereigns; yet there was no communication whatever in either to show who had sent them. It was supposed, by way of explanation, that a person proceeding to Australia had directed the packets to himself, intending to reach the colony by means of another ship; and that, having died upon the passage, or his ship having been lost, no application was ever made for them at the office to which they had been directed.
On one occasion a cheque for £9, 15s. was found loose in a pillar letter-box in Birmingham. The owner was traced through the bank upon which the cheque was drawn, but he was unable to give any explanation of the circumstances under which it had passed from his possession.
The following are a series of instances in which letters have got out of their proper bearings,—chiefly in the hands of the senders or the persons addressed, or through the carelessness of the servants of those persons; and the cases show how prone the public are to lay blame upon the Post-office when anything goes wrong with their letters, beforemaking proper search in their own premises. A number of cases are added, in which the servants of the senders or of the persons addressed have been proved dishonest, when the blame had first been laid upon Post-office servants; and one or two cases are given where the Department has been held up as the delinquent, merely to afford certain individuals an excuse for not paying money due by them, or otherwise to shirk their obligations.
"A person applied at the Leeds Post-office, and stated that two letters (one of which contained the half of a bank-note) which he had himself posted at that office had not reached their destination—mentioning at the same time some circumstances associated with the alleged posting of the letters. After some conversation, he was requested to produce the letter which had informed him of the non-receipt of the letters in question; but instead of producing it, he, to his own great astonishment, took from his pocket the very letters which he believed he had himself posted."
"Inquiry having been made respecting a letter sent to a person residing at Kirkcudbright, it appeared that it had been duly delivered, but that the addressee having left the letter on a table during the night, it had been devoured by rats." Another case of the depredation of rats upon letters is as follows:—
Certain letters which ought to have reached a bookseller in a country town not having been received, it was concluded, after inquiry, that they had been duly delivered, but had subsequently been withdrawn from under the street door, which was furnished with a slit to receive letters, but without a box to retain them. During subsequent alterations in the shop, however, when it was necessary to remove the flooring under the window, the discovery was made of thirty-one letters, six post-cards, and three newspapers which had been carried thither by rats! The corners of the letters,&c., bearing the stamps, were nibbled away, leaving no doubt that the gum upon the labels was the inducement to the theft. Several of the letters contained cheques and money-orders.
But rats are old enemies to letters, as is known in the Post-office; for in the olden times, when sailing-ships were in use as mail-packets, sad complaints were made of the havoc caused by "ratts" to the mails conveyed in these ships.
Nor are rats the only dumb creatures which have shown a "literary" turn, in getting possession of post-letters. Some years ago a postman was going his rounds delivering letters in Kelvedon, in Essex, carrying a registered letter in his hand ready to deliver it at the next house, when a tame raven—a worthy compeer, if not a contemporary, of the Jackdaw of Rheims—suddenly darted down, snatched it from his grasp, and flew off with it. The bewildered postman could only watch the bird while it made a circuit over the town, which it did before alighting; and so soon as it got to a suitable place, it set to work to analyse the composition of the missive by tearing the letter to pieces. The fragments were shortly afterwards collected and put together, when it was found that part of them were the remains of a cheque for £30, which was afterwards renewed when the singular affair was made known.
Another curious incident in which birds are concerned occurred in the spring of 1884 at Shewbridge Hall, near Nantwich, in Cheshire. For the convenience of the people at the Hall, a letter-box is placed by the gate at the roadside, into which the post-runner drops the correspondence addressed to Shewbridge Hall. Mr Lockett, the occupier of the house, expecting a letter from Liverpool, containing a cheque for £10, went to the box, where, as it happened, he found the letter, but in a mutilated state, and the chequegone. Believing that a robbery of his box had been committed, or that the letter had been violated before being deposited therein, he forthwith rode into Nantwich to report the matter at the Post-office and to the police. Returning later on, he examined the box more closely, and discovered tomtits inside; and further investigation led to the discovery of the cheque lying twenty yards away on the turnpike road, whither it had evidently been carried for examination. The cheque was folded small, and could therefore be easily carried by these small birds.
Letter-box taken possession of by Tomtits.
Letter-box taken possession of by Tomtits.
The tomtits had taken possession of the box for nesting purposes, and perhaps they found the letter to be in the way, and accordingly made an effort to remove it. In the spring of the previous year a pair of tomtits built their nest inthis letter-box (possibly the same pair), and reared a brood of young, though letters were being dropped into the box every day.
A very similar circumstance occurred in the same season at a place near Lockerbie, where a letter-box is affixed to the trunk of a tree bordering on the main road, for the convenience of the people living at Daltonhook farm, which occupies a site some distance from the highway. The letter-box is about fifteen inches square, with the usual slit to admit of letters being dropped in, and a door to the front the full size of the box, to allow the postman to clear it or to place larger packets within. A pair of tomtits, considering the box an eligible place for bringing up a family, built their nest in it, obtaining ingress and egress by the letter-slit, and choosing that portion of the interior farthest from the door for their purpose. In contrast to the ruthlessness and cruelty of many who show no love to God's creatures unless they contribute in some way to their comfort or profit, the post-runner and the family who use the box, in a kind-hearted way took every care to disturb these objects of interest as little as possible, and in due time the nest was complete, and eight tiny eggs were deposited therein. While the female was sitting on the eggs during the term of incubation, she did not rise from the nest when the post-runner opened the door, but would make a peculiar noise and peck at his hand as he put it forward to take out or deposit letters. But after a time the two became more friendly, and kindness on the one side begetting confidence on the other, the bird at length became so familiar, that while it continued to sit on the nest it would peck crumbs from the man's hand, instead of showing displeasure, as it formerly had done. At length seven young birds became the joy of the parents. These, however, did not find the box altogether free from drawbacks; for letters, in beingdeposited through the slit, sometimes fell on the top of the youngsters, and so excited the wrath of the old birds. This was proved on one occasion when a servant dropped a letter into the box, for when the post-runner next visited the receptacle, he found the letter so mutilated, either through sheer rage on the part of the tomtits, or in their endeavours to eject it by the slit, that he took it back to the farmhouse rather than send it forward in its badly damaged state. However, the brood at length got through the troubles of their infantile days; and we may indulge the hope that they have since lived to join in the antiphonies of the grove, or to adorn the roadside spray with their neat figures and glowing colours.
It may be added that these little birds are very eccentric in the choice of their nesting-places. In one case they selected the inside of a weathercock on the top of a steeple for their breeding-place, and in another the interior of a beehive in full work. Here they set up house and reared their young, neither injuring the bees, nor being molested by them in return.
"A gentleman at Archerstown, county Westmeath, complained of a letter, containing half bank-notes and post-bills amounting to £400, addressed to Dublin, not having come to hand; but when the matter came to be fully examined, it was ascertained that the letter was in a drawer in the house of the very person to whom it had been directed, but by whom it had been entirely overlooked."
A banker residing in a country town in Scotland reported that a letter containing two £20 notes and two £1 notes, addressed to him by another banker, and posted at a town ten miles distant, had not come to hand. On inquiry, the sender could not state either the numbers or the dates of the notes. He had, moreover, allowed upwards of two months to elapse before taking any steps to ascertain whether hisletter had reached its destination. "As this valuable letter had been posted without the precaution of registration, and had the words 'county rates' on the envelope, it was supposed to have excited the cupidity of some one connected with one or other of the two Post-offices concerned, and an officer was immediately despatched to investigate the case. The complainant reiterated the statement that the letter had not reached him; but within half an hour of the officer's departure, an inmate of the house having made a fresh search, found the letter among some papers in a press, where it had apparently been placed unopened when received."
"A bank agent sent a letter containing valuable enclosures to another bank agent. The letter was presumed to have been lost by the Post-office; but no trace of it could be obtained there, and the applicant was informed accordingly. It subsequently appeared that the son of the person to whom the letter had been addressed had called at the Post-office and received the letter, and that he had afterwards left the town for the holidays, carrying the letter away with him in his pocket, where it had remained."
"A letter supposed to contain a £10 note was registered at Moffat, and in due course delivered to the addressee, who, however, declined to sign a receipt for it, as the £10 note was missing. The sender was written to, but he asserted that the note had been enclosed. The postmaster chiefly concerned (who had been more than fifty years in the service) was greatly distressed at the doubt thus cast upon his honesty; but on further inquiry, the sender admitted that he had obtained a trace of the £10 note, and stated that the fault had not been with the Post-office. On being pressed for fuller information, he stated that when writing his letter he had placed the £10 note in an envelope and affixed a postage-stamp thereon, when a lady came hurriedlyinto his shop, also to write a letter, and he had assisted her by getting an envelope and placing a postage-stamp on it; that he had placed this envelope beside that which contained the bank-note; and that when the lady had finished her letter, he gave her by mistake the envelope with the £10 note in it, and put his own letter into the empty envelope. He had carried the two letters to the Post-office; and his own, which he supposed contained the £10, he had registered. Both letters were safely delivered; and the £10 having been returned as evidently sent in error, the lady who had forwarded it brought it to the complainant, and thus the mystery was cleared up."
During a snowstorm which occurred a year or two ago, a London firm put up for posting, among others, a letter to a Glasgow firm containing a cheque for a sum little short of £1000. The cheque not reaching its destination in due course, payment was stopped at the bank, and notwithstanding that every inquiry was made, nothing was heard of the letter at the time. Eventually, however, the cheque was brought to the firm who had drawn it, together with the letter, by a police-inspector, who had found the letter adhering to a block of ice floating in the Thames off Deptford. The supposition is, that when the letters of the day were being carried to the Lombard Street Post-office, this letter was dropped in the street, that it was carted off in the snow to the Thames, and there, after a week's immersion in the river, got affixed to the block of ice, as already stated.
On the 27th February 1885, a medical gentleman residing at Richmond, Surrey, when going his usual round of visits, found on the carriage floor two letters, one addressed to a person in Edinburgh, the other to a lady residing near Castle-Douglas. The letters had been duly prepared for the post, each bearing an undefaced postage-stamp, but nothing in their appearance indicated that they had ever been posted. The finder was at first puzzled at the discovery, but on reflection, he remembered having a few minutes previously opened a large newspaper, the 'Queen,' which had reached him from Edinburgh two or three days before, but had till then remained unopened in his carriage. It occurred to him that the letters might have come concealed within the folds of the newspaper, and he was good enough to forward a note with each to the persons addressed, explaining the circumstances under which he had found them. Subsequent investigation by the Post-office brought to light the fact that one of the two letters, and the copy of the 'Queen' from which they were supposed to have dropped, had been deposited in different pillar-boxes in Edinburgh, but in the same collector's district; and there can be no doubt that this letter, and probably also the other letter, were shaken inside the folds of the newspaper during their conveyance to the head-office in the collector's bag. In one of the notes which the doctor sent with the letters, he made this remark:—"I cannot help feeling that the postal authorities and the public should both have their eyes opened to what a serious danger such a letter-trap as a large newspaper might prove." He omitted to add, however, that the sender of the 'Queen' had tied it up very carelessly without a wrapper, and in a way that could hardly fail to render it a dangerous travelling companion for letters. Had the letters fallen into dishonest hands, their loss would certainly have been attributed to the Post-office, and the case is one which aptly illustrates a means by which letters sometimes get out of their proper course, or are lost altogether.
A firm of solicitors in Leith wrote a letter to a client in the same town, enclosing a cheque for £102; and this letter, although it was alleged to have been duly posted,failed to reach the person for whom it was intended. The usual inquiries were made, but unsuccessfully, no trace being discovered of the letter. Some days afterwards the firm received the letter and cheque, minus the envelope, from a farmer near Tranent, in one of whose fields a ploughman had picked them up. This man was engaged spreading town-refuse upon the field when he found the letter, which he opened, and thereupon threw away the cover. For the purposes of investigation, it was very essential that this should be produced; but it happened that meanwhile the field had been gone over with a grubbing machine, and the chances of the recovery of the discarded envelope were thereby greatly lessened. The ploughman's son was set to work, however, to make a search, and after toiling a whole day, he found the envelope. On examination, it was seen that the postage-stamp affixed was still undefaced, and the envelope bore nothing to show that it had ever been in the Post-office. The whole circumstances left no doubt that the letter had either got into the waste-paper basket of the senders, or had been dropped on the way to the Post-office, and that it had been carried ten miles into the country amongst street rubbish, with which, as manure, the farm in question was supplied from the town of Leith.
A registered letter posted at Newcastle, and addressed to a banker in Edinburgh, not having reached the addressee's hands, a telegram was forwarded to the sender intimating the fact, and requesting explanation of the failure. The banker supposed that the letter had been lost or purloined in the Post-office; but it was afterwards proved to have been duly delivered to the bank porter, who having locked it up in his desk, had quite forgotten it.
A lady residing in Jersey applied to the Post-office respecting a letter which had been sent by her to a clergyman at Oxford. Inquiry was made for it at all the offices through which it would pass, but unsuccessfully, no trace whatever of it being found. Subsequently the clergyman informed the secretary of the Post-office that he had found the letter between the cushions of his own arm-chair, where it had been placed, no doubt, at the time of delivery.
"A person complained of delay in the receipt of a letter which appeared to have passed through the Post-office twice. It transpired that the letter had, in the first instance, been duly delivered at a shop, where it was to remain till called for, but that it had accidentally been taken away with some music by a customer, who had afterwards dropped it in the street. Subsequently the letter must have been picked up and again posted, and hence its double passage through the Post-office."
"A barrister complained of the non-delivery of a letter containing the halves of two £10 Bank of England notes, stating that he had posted the letter himself; but he shortly afterwards wrote to say that the letter had reached its destination. It appeared that, instead of putting it into the letter-box, he had dropped the letter in the street, where, fortunately, it was picked up by some honest person, who posted it."
A business firm having frequently failed to receive letters which had been addressed to them, made complaint on the subject from time to time; but the inquiries which were instituted resulted in nothing. After much trouble, however, it was at length discovered that a defect existed in the letter-box in the firm's office-door, and fifteen letters were found lodged between the box and the door, some of which had been in that situation more than nine years.
A letter said to contain a cheque for £12, 4s., addressed to a London firm, not having reached its destination, inquiries were made with respect to it. At the end of threemonths it turned up at apapier-mâchéfactory, whither it had, no doubt, been carried among waste-paper from the office at which it had been delivered.
In 1883, a registered letter sent from Dunkeld on a given date was duly received in Edinburgh, and delivered at its address, which was a bank, the postman obtaining a signature to the receipt-form in the usual way. Some little time afterwards complaint was made by the manager of the bank that the letter had not been received; but the Post-office was able to prove the contrary by the receipt, the signature to which, on being submitted to the manager, was acknowledged to be that of the wife of the housekeeper of the establishment. Yet this person could give no account of the letter, nor had any one else seen it; and as the letter was stated to have contained four £1 notes and a bank deposit-book, the fact of its disappearance gave rise to a state of things which can be better imagined than described. The Post-office, in the circumstances, offered the suggestion that the bank's waste-paper should be carefully examined. As it happened, however, a quantity of this material had just been cleared out, having been purchased by a waste-paper dealer; and the fact made the chances of recovery in that direction all the more remote. Yet the housekeeper was set to work: he traced the bags first to the store of the dealer, then to the premises of a waste-paper merchant in another part of the city. With assistance he carefully examined the contents of the bags filled at the bank, and his efforts were rewarded by the discovery of the registered letter, which was in precisely the same state as when delivered, never having been opened. It had very likely fallen from a desk in the bank on to the floor, and by a careless person been brushed aside with used envelopes and scraps of paper, thus finding its way into the waste-paper basket.
In April 1873, a letter was posted in a certain village in Ayrshire, addressed by a wife to her husband, who was in command of a vessel bound for New York. The letter was properly directed to the captain by name, it bore the name of his ship, and was addressed to the care of the British Consul, New York. The captain never received the letter, and this circumstance gave rise, upon his return from sea, to what is described as a "feud" between him and his wife,—he, reposing perhaps greater faith in the Post-office than in the dutiful attentions of his wife, believing that his better-half had not written to him, since he failed to receive the letter on application at its place of address in New York. Time, with its incessant changes, hopes, fears, joys, and disappointments, winged its hurried flight for a period of eleven years ere the matter which had caused the feud came to be fully understood. At the end of that time the same letter was returned to the writer through the Dead-letter Office, having (according to the stamp upon it) been unclaimed at New York. It was stated that the return of the letter had "put all to rights" between the couple concerned, though it is to be hoped that the healing hand of Time had already done much in this direction, and that the return of the long-lost letter did nothing more than put the finishing touch to restored confidence. In connection with this matter, it was afterwards ascertained that the letter was one of over 4000 similar letters returned to the New York Post-office from the offices of the British Consul in that city, upon a new appointment being made to the Consulate,—the "new broom," as one of his first acts, having made a clean sweep of this accumulation of letters, some of which had been lying there no less than seventeen years. How far the failure of these letters to reach the persons addressed was due to their not having been called for, or to the negligence of clerks at theConsulate, is not known, nor will it ever be ascertained what heart-burnings and misery may have been occasioned by this wholesale miscarriage of correspondence.
In March 1880, a letter plainly addressed to an individual by name, and bearing the name and number of a street in a certain district of London, reached the Dead-letter Office, whither it had been sent by the postman of the district, owing to the person to whom it was directed not being known at the address given. When opened, with a view to its return to the writer, the letter was discovered to contain a Bank of England note for £100, together with a short memorandum suggesting the return of the note to some person, but in such vague and general terms that no one who had not had previous information on the subject could have fully understood the purport of the message.
The memorandum was, moreover, without head or tail—it had no superscription to indicate whence it had come, nor had it a signature to show by whom it had been written. The circumstance being one of an exceptional character, special steps were taken with a view to trace the owner, and an advertisement was inserted in several of the metropolitan newspapers—bringing up, it is true, a responsive crop of claimants for lost notes, but without eliciting any such claims as would warrant the surrender of the note in question. From the terms of the memorandum in the letter, and the fact that it was anonymous, the suggestion readily arose that whoever had had the note last had not come by it in the regular way of business; and this idea was strengthened by the discovery that the note had been paid over by a bank about eight years previously to a person whose name and address were endorsed upon it; and from that period the note had evidently not been in circulation. It was thought probable that the endorser had lost the note in some way shortly after receiving it, andthat coming into the hands of some individual who feared to put it in circulation, it had been kept up during these eight years. Meanwhile, the right to receive the note not having been established by any one, the amount was paid in to the Revenue.
In the Postmaster-General's report for 1881, further mention was made of the finding of the note in the Dead-letter Office, and several claims again reached headquarters, one of which proved to be so far good, that, when the facts had been fully investigated, the amount was paid over to the claimant.
It appeared that the person whose name was endorsed on the note received it in part payment of a cheque cashed by him in 1872, when he was bought out of the business in which he had till then been a partner. Two years afterwards—viz., in 1874—he died, and his widow was unaware at the time that the note had been lost. From circumstances which this lady was able to prove, however, there seemed to be every reason to believe that her husband (whose practice it was to endorse notes when he had received them) had by some means lost the note, or that it had been carelessly left by him in some old book or other papers which were sold as waste-paper after her husband's death; and thus the Post-office was made the means of restoring a considerable sum of money to the rightful owner, while the person who had without title possessed it in the interval dared not claim it.
"A letter said to have been posted by a person at Fochabers, enclosing a letter of credit for £50, was supposed to have been appropriated by an officer of the Post-office; but on inquiry it was ascertained that, instead of posting the letter himself, as he asserted, the writer had intrusted it to a servant, who had destroyed the letter, and had attempted to negotiate the order."
"A person complained repeatedly of letters addressed to him having been intercepted and tampered with, and of drafts having been stolen from them and negotiated. There being ground to suspect that the thief was in the complainant's own office, he reluctantly consented to test the honesty of his clerks; and the result showed that one of them was the guilty party, the man being subsequently tried and convicted. The thefts had been committed by means of a duplicate key, which gave the clerk access to the letter-box."
"Several complaints were made of the non-delivery of letters addressed to the editor of a newspaper; but this gentleman afterwards intimated that he had discovered that the delinquent was his own errand-boy, who confessed to having pilfered his letter-box."
"A similar case occurred at Romsey, where, on an investigation by the surveyor, it was discovered that the applicant's errand-boy had abstracted the letters from his private bag, which it was found could be done even when the bag was locked."
"Application was made respecting a letter containing a cheque for £79, 12s. 11d., which had been presented and cashed. The letter had not been registered, and no trace of it could be discovered. The applicants, however, ultimately withdrew their complaint against the Post-office, stating their belief that the missing letter had not been posted, but had been stolen by one of their clerks, who had absconded."
"A merchant sent his errand-boy to post a letter, and to purchase a stamp to put upon it. The letter contained negotiable bills amounting to £1200; and as the merchant did not receive an acknowledgment from his correspondent, he cast the blame on the Post-office. An inquiry followed, which resulted in showing that the errand-boy had metanother boy on a similar mission, who undertook to post the letter in question. On further reflection, however, the latter resolved to convert the penny intended for a postage-stamp into sweetmeats, which he did, and then destroyed the letter with its contents, carrying the fragments into a field near the Post-office, where they were found hidden."
A sailor applied for a missing letter containing a money-order for 30s., which he said had been sent, but had not reached him; but when he found that the matter was under strict investigation, he confessed that the money had been paid to him, and that he had denied having received it, in order to excuse himself from not paying a debt to the person with whom he lodged.
"A person having applied for a missing letter, said to contain two £10 and one £5 Bank of England notes, and which he stated had been sent to him by his father, it appeared on inquiry that no such letter had been written; and he afterwards confessed that his object in asking for the letter was a device to keep in abeyance a pecuniary demand upon him by his landlady."
Some years ago a person complained that twelve sovereigns had been abstracted from a letter received by him while it was in transit through the post, but he was told in reply that the envelope bore evidence that it had not contained coin to that amount. This person then communicated with the sender of the letter, who persisted in declaring that she had put therein the amount stated. At this stage of the inquiry an officer was despatched to investigate the matter; and upon his requiring the woman who had sent the envelope to accompany him before a magistrate to attest the truth of her statement upon oath, she confessed that the statement was false, and explained her conduct by saying that she had promised to lend the person to whom the envelope had been addressed £12, but that she had beenunwilling to do so, as she felt sure that she should never get her money back again; and that she determined, therefore, to keep her money, and throw the blame on the Post-office.
"A bank in Glasgow some years ago complained that a letter had been delivered there without its contents—halves of bank-notes for £75; and on a strict investigation, it appeared that the letter had been intrusted to a boy to post, who confessed that, being aware the letter contained money, and finding that the wafer with which it was fastened was wet, he had been tempted to steal the contents, which, at the time, he believed to be whole notes; but who added that when, on afterwards examining them, he found them to be halves only, he enclosed them in an unfastened sheet of paper, which he directed according, as he believed, to the address of the letter from which he had taken them. The halves of the notes and sheet of paper were subsequently discovered in the Glasgow Post-office, the address on the paper being, however, very different from that of the letter in which the notes had been enclosed."
"Complaint was made that a letter containing the halves of Bank of England notes for £65, sent to a firm in Liverpool, had failed to reach its destination. On inquiry, it appeared that the letter had been duly delivered, and subsequently stolen by a well-known thief, who had the audacity to go and claim the corresponding half-notes from another firm in Liverpool, to whose care the stolen letter showed they had been sent by the same post; and in this object the scoundrel succeeded."