side there were some small marks which
she had carefully noted before giving the letter back to the carrier.
Those marks were the _letter_, which was from her brother, with whom she
had agreed upon a short-hand system by which to communicate news without
expense. "We are so poor," said she to the poet, "that we have invented
this manner of corresponding and sending our letters free."

[Illustration: SIR ROWLAND HILL.]

The shilling which the postman demanded was, in fact, about a week's
wages to a girl in her condition fifty years ago. Nor was it poor girls
only who then played tricks upon the post-office. Envelopes franked by
honorable members of Parliament were a common article of merchandise,
for it was the practice of their clerks and servants to procure and sell
them. Indeed, the postal laws were so generally evaded that, in some
large towns, the department was cheated of three quarters of its
revenue. Who can wonder at it? It cost more then to send a letter from
one end of London to the other, or from New York to Harlem, than it now
does to send a letter from Egypt to San Francisco. The worst effect of
dear postage was the obstacles it placed in the way of correspondence
between poor families who were separated by distance. It made
correspondence next to impossible between poor people in Europe and
their relations in America. Think of an Irish laborer who earned
sixpence a day paying _seventy-five cents_ to get news from a daughter
in Cincinnati! It required the savings of three or four months.

The man who changed all this, Sir Rowland Hill, died only three years
ago at the age of eighty-three. I have often said that an American ought
to have invented the new postal system; and Rowland Hill, though born
and reared in England, and descended from a long line of English
ancestors, was very much an American. He was educated on the American
plan. His mind was American, and he had the American way of looking at
things with a view to improving them.

His father was a Birmingham schoolmaster, a free trader, and more than
half a republican. He brought up his six sons and two daughters to use
their minds and their tongues. His eldest son, the recorder of
Birmingham, once wrote of his father thus:--

"Perhaps the greatest obligation we owe our father is this: that, from
infancy, he would reason with us, and so observe all the rules of fair
play, that we put forth our little strength without fear. Arguments were
taken a