. Thus three days
were consumed in the journey of a letter from Ipswich to Bury by the
nearest postal route, and nothing was to be gained by adopting the
alternative route _via_ London.

In 1781 the postal staff in Edinburgh was composed of twenty-three
persons, of whom six were letter-carriers. The indoor staff of the
Glasgow Post Office in 1789 consisted of the postmaster and one clerk,
and as ten years later there were only four postmen employed, the
outdoor force in 1789 was probably only four men.

Liverpool, in the year 1792, when its population stood at something like
60,000, had only three postmen, whose wages were 7s. a week each. One of
the men, however, was assisted by his wife, and for this service the
Post Office allowed her from L10 to L12 a year. Their duties seem to
have been carried out in an easy-going, deliberate fashion. The men
arranged the letters for distribution in the early morning, then they
partook of breakfast, and started on their rounds about 9 A.M.,
completing their delivery about the middle of the afternoon. It would
thus seem that a hundred years ago there was but one delivery daily in
Liverpool.

During the same period there were only three letter-carriers employed at
Manchester, four at Bristol, and three or four at Birmingham. In our own
times the number of postmen serving these large towns may be counted by
the hundreds, or, I might almost say, thousands.

The delivery of letters in former times was necessarily a slow affair,
for two reasons, namely:--that prepayment was not compulsory, and the
senders of letters thoughtfully left the receivers to pay for them, when
the postmen would often be kept waiting for the money. And secondly,
streets were not named and numbered systematically as they now are, and
concise addresses were impossible.

It is no doubt the case that order and method in laying out the streets
and in regulating generally the buildings of towns are things of quite
modern growth. In old-fashioned towns we find the streets running at all
angles to one another, and describing all sorts of curves, without any
regard whatever to general harmony. And will it be believed that the
numbering of the houses in streets is comparatively a modern
arrangement! Walter Thornbury tells us in his _Haunted London_ that
"names were first put on doors in 1760 (some years before the street
signs were removed). In 1764 houses were first numbered, the numbering
commencing in New Burleig