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.