though the recipient often opens them with
pleasurable sensations, which immediately sink to zero. And the
love-letters! The carrier is a veritable Sherlock Holmes when it comes
to them.

Gradually he becomes acquainted with the inmost secrets of those upon
his route. Friendship, love, and marriage, absence and return, death,
and one's financial condition, are all as an open book to the man
in grey. Invitations, cards, wedding announcements, forlorn little
letters from those to whom writing is not as easy as speech, childish
epistles with scrap pictures pasted on the outside, all give an
inkling of their contents to the man who delivers them.

When the same bill comes to the same house for a long and regular
period, then ceases, even the carrier must feel relieved to know that
it has been paid. When he isn't too busy, he takes a friendly look at
the postal cards, and sometimes saves a tenant in a third flat the
weariness of two flights of stairs by shouting the news up the tube!

If the dweller in a tenement has ingratiating manners, he may learn
how many papers, and letters are being stuffed into the letter-box, by
a polite inquiry down the tube when the bell rings. Through the subtle
freemasonry of the postman's voice a girl knows that her lover has not
forgotten her--and her credit is good for the "two cents due" if the
tender missive is overweight.

"All the world loves a lover," and even the busy postman takes a
fatherly interest in the havoc wrought by Cupid along his route. The
little blind god knows neither times nor seasons--all alike are his
own--but the man in grey, old and spectacled though he may be, is his
confidential messenger.

Love-letters are seemingly immortal. A clay tablet on which one of the
Pharaohs wrote, asking for the heart and hand of a beautiful foreign
princess, is now in the British Museum. But suppose the postman had
not been sure-footed, and all the clay letters had been smashed into
fragments in a single grand catastrophe! What a stir in high places,
what havoc in Church and State, and how many fond hearts broken, if
the postman had fallen down!

"Nothing feeds the flame like a letter," said Emerson; "it has intent,
personality, secrecy." Flimsy and frail as it is, so easily torn or
destroyed, the love-letter many times outlasts the love. Even the
Father of his Country, though he has been dead this hundred years or
more, has left behind him a love-letter, ragged and faded, but s