used on
the 7th April, 1851, and your statement that you have an envelope
sent on that date from New Carlisle to Toronto with 'Three Pence'
printed on it, inside a fancy border, I have to say that postage
stamps were issued to the public for the first time on the 23rd
April, 1851, and that stamped envelopes were not issued until some
years later. The stamped envelope to which you refer may have been
an envelope so stamped on the prepayment in the New Carlisle Post
Office, of three pence, the required charge for postage.

"I am, sir, your obedient servant,

"WILLIAM SMITH, Secretary."

It will be noted from the conclusion of this letter that, according to
the department at Ottawa, one might infer that the use of such a stamp
would not be irregular. This is confirmed by the following extract from
a reply to a letter a friend of mine wrote to Ottawa at my request:--

OTTAWA, March 2nd, 1904.

"I took those questions of Mr. Greenshields over to Mr. ---- of the
Post Office Department. He tells me that before the first issue of
stamps, which took place on the 23rd of April, 1851, each
Postmaster had a steel stamp which he used to mark the amount
prepaid on the letter. These stamps were of different patterns, and
it is probably the impression of one of them that appears on Mr.
Greenshield's envelope. In some of the smaller post-offices they
continued to use these stamps as late as 1875.

"It is rather a singular coincidence that if the inquiry had been,
regarding the position of Postmaster, more than one day earlier,
the Canadian records would not have shown whether the man named had
held office or not, the reason being that it was on the 6th of
April, 1851, that the Post Office Department was transferred from
the Imperial Government, and all records prior to that date are in
the possession of the Imperial authorities."

It seems strange that more of these covers have not been found.
Such well-known authorities on the stamps of British North America
as Mr. Lachlan Gibb and Mr. William Patterson, of Montreal, and Mr.
Donald A. King, of Halifax, had not seen any until I consulted them
about this one. I think it is very interesting to hear of a stamped
envelope like this being used by the Post Office just before the
issue of postage stamps.

So far as we have