Part 18

Dull and heavy glide on the hours of night; silence like that of the prairie rests for a while on and around the city, save the howl of some watchful dog and the far-off sound of a tinkling bell. A city at night, wrapped in the curtains darkness throws around it, is like a vast sepulchre, and visited alike with ghosts from the _spirit_-world. Presently the dark panorama begins to move: there is an uprising of a long stream of light in the eastern sky; a vast and mysterious movement, as impulsive and as sudden as that of light, agitates the city; sounds quick and incessant come upon the ear,—rattling of wheels, ringing of bells: the world and its inhabitants are awake. The night dream is over; reality assumes its power once again. Moving on, men, women, and children take their respective ways to business or pleasure, for this world is made up of both. There you see the mechanic, there the merchant looking for the “early worm,” there the newsboy hurrying to his morning traffic in literature, himself its evil genius, there the housebreaker moving quietly away from the scene of his villany, and there the man of pleasure staggering to his wretched home. There is one point at which, however, many assemble: there, clustered around a marbled veneered building,—for it is not _all marble_,—you can read in the looks of the crowd the world’s history, and alike the name of the building: it is the PHILADELPHIA POST-OFFICE. The sun that awoke millions from their sleep now shines down and sheds its light around this “mimic world:” it awakes; its night slumber is over; the hour has arrived—action, action. The doors open—the crowd rush in. Ah! what is life?—one scene of struggle and strife, and for what? That’s the question.

“Quid sit futurum eras fuge quærere”

is not a bad idea of the poet Horace: its literal meaning is, “Avoid all inquiry with respect to what may happen to-morrow.” We should not look so anxiously into the future as to preclude all present enjoyment.

Action, action is the motto of our land. This the effect of a cause,—that cause the Revolution. It changed alike men and the opinion of nations upon the subject of sovereignty. Mental, physical, political, speculative, and financial revolutions are all the results of one great cause,—a cause bearing date 1776. Here we are; here in the post-office, one of the branches of the General Government. This is the little world of letters, this the index to the inner history of man. It is a book of thoughts.

THE DEPOSIT-WINDOWS.—These are surrounded by a motley crew; letters are dropped in hastily, some carefully by those who write in doubt and seem to hesitate the sending until the last moment. Why? Ah! reader, there is a mystery in all things: here mystery becomes secrecy. There you see an old lady carefully depositing a letter: she glances down the opening, takes one last look, and, sighing, silently moves away. What are the contents of that letter? It is her secret.

Pass on to the newspaper—not window; for newspapers are a wholesale article: singly they are mere letters; in bulk they are _legion_. You must go to a door, and there you will see bags piled Olympus high: these are opened and distributed into their respective pouches to go to all parts of the habitable world; for newspapers now are, like letters, “the world’s correspondents.” The inside of the office is now wide awake, the world outside is in arms and “eager for the fray.” Millions of letters go and come, millions of hearts are made glad by a mere stroke of the pen, which passes lightning-like through this postal medium, millions of hearts are alike made sad, and mourn and sob over the one line that brings news of sickness and of death.

The post-office in many points of view presents the appearance of a besieged fort. The chief clerk is at his post: he stands on a platform somewhat elevated above the line of the main floor; his eye glances along the line of clerks, some of whom are at the (port-holes) delivery-windows, awaiting the outward attack. The assault commences, the windows are assailed. Loud voices are heard, one above the rest shouts 2400: this is answered by an immediate discharge from within, which silences battery 2400. These attacks continue along the “box line” until the demand for surrender on the one side is answered by a furious discharge of _epistolary_ ammunition on the other. Both parties retire satisfied with the result. The victory, however, is always on the side of the post-office: the effect of the fire from their port-holes is felt when all within its lines are quiet. The wheels of the department uninjured move on. Let us take a glance through yonder opening. We are on the outside, looking into the interior of this postal fortress. Hundreds of active business-men are moving about in their shirt-sleeves, looking fierce and desperate: they are engaged in a great struggle,—a _struggle with time_. Some are dragging along the vast extent of flooring large leather pouches, others huge canvas bags: it seems, as you gaze, that they are the bodies of the dead and wounded, the result of the recent attack. Not so; they are mail-bags. See how furiously one is thrown down: it is seized upon as if a victim to be sacrificed. “Brass lock,” yells one. “Iron,” screams another. Brass or iron, they are quickly unlocked, and in an instant their contents are scattered like chaff, and away they go to the four quarters of the globe as fast as busy hands, wind, tide, and steam can take them.

No fort—not even Sumter, Darling, or the defences of Vicksburg—ever presented a more busy scene of life and death than does the post-office on the opening of mail-bags: it may indeed be compared to “life and death;” for, as we have said, it is a “struggle with time.”

And yet what to an outsider might seem all chaos, system has reduced to perfect order; and if the same observer will look once more into the office after these sudden attacks on mail-pouches and bags, he will see the parties sitting quietly down, seemingly well contented with the result of the strife between _time_, _matter_, _and motion_,—the conquerors they.

Mr. William Lewars, author of “Her Majesty’s Mails,” thus describes the scenes which daily occur from 5.45 to 6 o’clock in the London post-office:—

“It is then that an impetuous crowd enters the hall, and letters and newspapers begin to fall in quite a literary hail-storm. The newspaper-window, ever yawning for more, is presently surrounded and besieged by an array of boys of all ages and costumes, together with children of a larger growth, who are all alike pushing, heaving, and surging in one great mass. The window with tremendous gape is assaulted with showers of papers which fly thicker and faster than the driven snow. Now it is that small boys of eleven and twelve years of age, panting, Sinbad-like, under the weight of huge bundles of newspapers, manage somehow to dart about and make rapid _sorties_ into other ranks of boys, utterly disregarding the cries of the official policemen, who vainly endeavor to reduce the tumult into something like post-office order. If the lads cannot quietly and easily disembogue, they will whiz their missiles of intelligence over other people’s heads, now and then sweeping off hats and caps with the force of shot. The gathering every moment increases in number and intensifies in purpose; arms, legs, sacks, baskets, heads, bundles, and woollen comforters—for who ever saw a veritable newspaper-boy without that appendage?—seems to be getting into a state of confusion and disagreeable communism, and ‘yet the cry is still they come.’ Heaps of papers of widely-opposed political views are thrown in together; no longer placed carefully in the openings, they are now sent in in sackfuls and basketfuls, while over the heads of the surging crowd come flying back the empty sacks thrown out of the office by the porters inside. Semi-official legends, with a very strong smack of probability about them, tell of sundry boys being thrown in, seized, emptied, and thrown out again _void_. As six o’clock approaches still nearer and nearer, the turmoil increases more perceptibly, for the intelligent British public is fully alive to the awful truth that the post-office officials never allow a minute of grace, and that “Newspaper Fair” must be over when the last stroke of six is heard. _One_, in rush files of laggard boys who have purposely loitered in the hope of a little pleasurable excitement; _two_, and grown men hurry in with their last sacks; _three_, the struggle resembles nothing so much as a pantomimic _mêlée_; _four_, a Babel of tongues vociferating desperately; _five_, final and furious showers of papers, sacks, and bags; and _six_, when all the windows fall like so many swords of Damocles, and the slits close with such a sudden and simultaneous snap, that we naturally suppose it to be a part of the post-office operations that attempts should be made to guillotine a score of hands; and then all is over so far as the outsiders are concerned.

“Among the letter-boxes, scenes somewhat similar have been enacted. Letters of every shape and color, and of all weights, have unceasingly poured in; tidings of life and death, hope and despair, success and failure, triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow; letters from friends and notes from lawyers, appeals from children and stern advice from parents, offers from anxious-hearted young gentlemen and ‘first yeses’ or refusals from young maidens, letters containing that snug appointment so long promised you, and ‘little bills’ with requests for immediate payments, ‘together with six-and-eightpence;’ cream-colored missives telling of happy consummations, and black-edged envelopes telling of death and the grave; sober-looking advice notes, doubtless telling when ‘our Mr. Puffwell’ would do himself the honor of calling upon you, and elegant-looking billets, in which business is never mentioned, all jostled each other for a short time; but the stream of gladness and of woe was stopped, at least for one night, when the last stroke of six was heard. The post-office, like a huge monster,—to which one writer has likened it,—has swallowed an enormous meal, and, gorged to the full, it must now commence the process of digestion. While laggard boys, to whom cartoons by one ‘William Hogarth’ should be shown, are muttering, ‘Too late,’ and retiring discomfited, we, having obtained the requisite ‘open sesame,’ will make our way to the interior of the building. Threading our course through several passages, we soon find ourselves among enormous apartments well lit up, where hundreds of human beings are moving about, lifting, shuffling, stamping, and sorting huge piles of letters, and still more enormous piles of newspapers, in what seems at first sight hopeless confusion, but in what is really the most admirable order. In the newspaper-room, men have been engaged not only in emptying the sacks flung in by strong-armed men and weak-legged boys, but also in raking up the single papers into large baskets and conveying them up and down ‘hoists’ into various divisions of the building. Some estimate of the value of these mechanical appliances, moved, of course, by steam-power, may be formed from the fact that hundreds of tons of paper pass up and down these lifts every week. As many of the newspapers escape from their covers in the excitement of posting, each night two or three officers are busily engaged during the whole time of despatch in endeavoring to restore wrappers to newspapers found without any address. Great as is the care exercised in this respect, it will occasionally happen that wrong newspapers will find their way into loose wrappers not belonging to them; and, under the circumstances, it would be by no means a matter of wonder if—as has been more than once pointed out—Mr. Bright should, instead of his ‘Morning Star,’ receive a copy of the ‘Saturday Review,’ or an evangelical curate the ‘Guardian’ or ‘Punch,’ in place of his ‘Record’ paper.

“In the letter-room the officers are no less busily engaged: a number of them are constantly at work, during the hours of the despatch, in the operation of placing each letter with the address and postage-label uppermost, so as to facilitate the process of stamping. In the general post-office the stamping is partly effected by machinery and partly by hand, and consists simply in imprinting upon each letter the date, hour, and place of posting, while at the same time the queen’s head with which the letter is ornamented and franked gets disfigured. It will easily be imagined that a letter containing a box of pills stands a very good chance of being damaged under this manipulation, as a good stamper will strike about fifty letters in a minute. Unpaid letters are kept apart, as they require stamping in a different-colored ink and with the double postage. Such letters create much extra labor, and are a source of incessant trouble to the department, inasmuch as from the time of their posting in London to their delivery at the Land’s End or John O’Groat’s, every officer through whose hands they may pass has to keep a cash account of them. The double postage on such letters is more than earned by the post-office. All unfastened and torn letters, too, are picked out and conveyed to another portion of the large room; and it requires the unremitting attention of several busy individuals to finish the work left undone by the British public. It is scarcely credible that above two hundred and fifty letters are daily posted _open_, and bearing not the slightest mark of ever having been fastened in any way; but such is the fact. A fruitful source of extra work to this branch of the office arises through the posting of flimsy boxes containing feathers, slippers, and other _récherché_ articles of female dress, pillboxes containing jewelry, and even bottles. The latter, however, are detained, glass articles and sharp instruments of any sort, whenever detected, being returned to the senders. These frail things, thrown in and buried under the heaps of correspondence, get crushed and broken: yet all are made up again carefully and resealed.

“When the letters have been stamped, and those insufficiently paid picked out, they are carried away to undergo the process of sorting. In this operation they are very rapidly divided into ‘roads,’ representing a line of large towns: thus, letters for Derby, Loughborough, Nottingham, Lincoln, etc., might be placed in companionship with one division or ‘road,’ and Bilston, Wednesbury, Walsall, West Bromwich, etc., in another.”

As we have stated, the immense amount of business transacted in the post-offices of large cities is not unfrequently lost sight of,—business transactions of a nature that few understand or comprehend, and which exercise an influence on men and nations equally as powerful as that of the press.

Few persons are acquainted with the inner arrangements of a post-office. Let any one glance into it as he passes, and he will be struck with the vast pile of mail-matter constantly arriving and departing, as well as the number of hands engaged in their arranging and distributing. Forty mails arrive and depart in the twenty-four hours,—making over three hundred pouches, besides canvas bags containing newspapers, &c.: these are estimated more by bulk than numbers.

Mind, intellect, strength, quickness of action and of thought, are all required here, _and found_. Without this, confusion worse confounded would ensue, and the pulsation of this little world would cease to throb.

A post-office is a little world: it is peopled with the thoughts of men that go and come, pass and repass, move on afar and away over land and water to other cities, and return again,—some oppressed, some elated: “so runs the world away!”

What is the romance of a post-office but its reality? It is a history of letters. Peep into their contents, and you read a volume far surpassing the wildest flights of the imagination. And yet they are as a sealed book to all except those to whom they are directed. Yet you can read it in the action of the recipients, trace its effects, the moral is there.

Glance at the ladies’ window: see that tall female, upon whose face you can trace the dark lines of sorrow. Day after day has she called, asking in a trembling voice for a letter. She had told the clerk a sad story of an absent son,—told it for the purpose of explaining the cause of her frequent visits. Did she but know that beneath a blasted tree, scathed by the lightning flash of a thousand rebel muskets, he lies buried,—deep, deep down in the cold ground, with hundreds of others, both friends and foes, who fell there in bloody strife. But when the startling news did come, her tall form was seen no more at that window. She was alone in the world! Watch that window: it is an index to a volume of life. Not alone the broken-hearted and the sorrowing, not alone the forsaken wife and the expectant maiden, not alone the anxious mother, but the gay, the frivolous, the abandoned, all flock here; for all are mixed up in the great struggle of life.

Pass on to the box-window. There you read the history of men in trade and commerce. There you have a compendium of that wonderful thing known as and called ‘Change. There you will observe the various and peculiar characteristics of men as they eagerly clutch their letters and rush away. Watch their actions, and you will find that a line or two in a letter convulses the market, and for a while there is a commotion on ’Change. Watch the politician: by his looks you can read the secret of his heart. If you follow his footsteps and read the name of the publication-office into which he plunges, the chief editorial next day tells its contents. Perhaps it will read, “Reliable Intelligence from Richmond. The Rebel Army well supplied with Ammunition. Probable Recognition by England, &c.” Or, perhaps, if the publication-office should be on Fourth or Third Street, it may read, “Glorious News from Grant’s Army, &c.”

There is another portion of a post-office which adds another page to its romantic history; and that is the “Carriers’ Department.” Many a sad tale has the carrier to tell,—many a strange incident connected with his “constant round.” A glance into this room shows you a number of men busily engaged in assorting or “blocking” the letters on their route. These they receive in bulk from the distributor, which are passed to them from a smaller room through a series of pigeon-holes. And here we have a most remarkable illustration of what the human mind is capable of accomplishing. Let us explain. In 1854 the corporate limits of the city of Philadelphia were made coextensive with those of the county, covering an area of one hundred and twenty square miles, and placing twenty-one towns and villages under the guardianship of one Mayor and City Councils. In nearly all of these there were separate post-offices. The bringing of all these rural districts under one general postal head was one of the first suggestions that Mr. C. A. Walborn made to the department shortly after he became postmaster of this city. Postmaster-General Blair entered fully into his views upon this subject, and thus the whole rural district embracing the area named above is under one general postal head. Mr. Walborn established station-offices, engaged carriers; and letters are distributed within an area of over one hundred miles, with as much ease and facility as they were in the limits of the old city proper.

For the accommodation of persons residing at points remote from the general post-office, in Chestnut Street, stations have been arranged to which four mails are sent daily. In the extreme rural sections, three daily deliveries are considered sufficient by the residents, but four collections are made of matter for delivery or mailing. These stations are located as follows:—A, 41 South Eighteenth Street; B, Market Street, west of Thirty-Seventh, West Philadelphia; C, southeast corner of Broad and Coates Streets; D, 1206 North Third Street; E, corner Richmond and William Streets, Port Richmond; F, 90 Main Street, Frankford; G, Main Street, below Railroad Depot, Germantown; H, Main Street, below Church Lane, Chestnut Hill; I, Main Street, below Grape, Manayunk; K, Washington Street, near Fifth.

The carriers deliver letters and papers within the following bounds:—Delaware River on the east; Montgomery county line on the west; upper end of Frankford, Chestnut Hill, and Andora on the north; Delaware county line on the south, including the old districts of Kensington, Port Richmond, Bridesburg, Frankford, Rising Sun, Nicetown, Germantown, Mount Airy, Chestnut Hill, Falls of Schuylkill, Manayunk, Leverington, Andora, Blockley, Haddington, Hestonville, Belmont, and Kingsessing. If thrown into a square, this would form a territory of about ten by fifteen miles.

Sixty-three carriers are employed, making four deliveries daily, within the following boundaries: Delaware River, Schuylkill River, Canal Street, and York Street. There are thirty-four persons also employed exclusively in collecting letters from places of deposit within the same district. They make five collections daily. The rural districts, including that territory which is contained within the limits of Delaware county line on the south, Montgomery county line on the west, Delaware River on the east, and on the north the northern boundary of Chestnut Hill, Germantown, and Frankford, occupy twenty-four persons, making at least three trips per day to collect and deliver letters. There is, therefore, a force of one hundred and twenty-one carriers and collectors employed.

The number of letters received by mail and delivered by carriers amounted, last quarter, to 1,134,111. They collected and delivered, in the same period, 389,233 local or drop letters, making a total delivery of 1,523,344.[44]

The number of papers received by mail and delivered during this period was 117,010; the number of local or drop papers was 35,257, giving a total delivered, 152,267. The number of letters returned from misdirection, removal, refusal to pay postage, and similar reasons, was 8742. The number of letters for the mail collected from lamp-posts and other located boxes of deposit was 744,723; and the number of newspapers similarly obtained, 59,292,—a total of 804,015.

_THE LETTER-CARRYING SYSTEM._

But few persons have any adequate idea of the vast number of letters which day after day pass through the post-office into the hands of the carrier, to be delivered at their final destination. The following list gives the number of letters delivered and collected in the four largest cities during the month of June, 1865:—

Mail Letters Drop Letters Letters Delivered. Delivered. Collected.

New York 799,389 253,434 785,990 Philadelphia 492,004 168,330 361,068 Chicago 118,200 9,200 100,591 Cincinnati 84,370 7,714 47,201 ——————— ——————— ——————— Total 1,493,963 438,678 1,294,850

During the same period there were collected from pillar or lamp-post boxes 1,294,850 letters.

The annexed statement gives the number of letters delivered in three principal cities:—

Boston 284,440 Baltimore 152,230 Chicago 130,819 ——————— Total 567,489 Philadelphia 516,836

So, according to this, the amount of business transacted through the Philadelphia post-office is almost equal to that of Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago combined. Statistics further show that it is nearly equal to the combined business of Brooklyn, St. Louis, Washington, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.