April 30th, 1872. Fine.

At eleven o'clock in the morning, escorted by General Myers, we visited the United States Post Office. First we visited the Dead Letter Office, the repository for mail which cannot be delivered. Letters and parcels with illegible or mistaken names or addresses are brought here and opened in order to return them to the senders. If the sender cannot be determined, they are sent to the paper-making department and destroyed. If a letter contains money, the contents and date are recorded in a ledger. Until a few years ago people were required to pay a handling charge to retrieve mail. More than fifty men and women work here, opening and re-directing more than ten thousand letters which are sent here daily.

We were next shown the sorting and delivery department, where postal workers sort all the letters posted in the city's mail-boxes. On both sides of the tables the workers were sorting them by city, district and street address, and cancelling the postage stamps. Letters which seem too heavy are weighed and the addresses checked before they are sent on for delivery. Several hundred people, divided into various sections, work in the sorting department. The department gave us a book on postal regulations to help us understand the system.