Mexico weekly ledger., 1876-11-16

thirty years; but she has ceased to come,
and we think she is dead. Whoever opens
forming the clerks of the New York POST
Office OF their contents, as we have q great
curiosity to know who Maria Russell is. or
was. and something about the person who
has been sending her these letters regularly
for SO long.
This note was submitted to q conven-
tionof clerks and declared unanimously
to be the proper thing. A reply was
awaited ~anxiously. Before it came two
more letters had followed their fellows
in, and were waiting for Maria Russell !;
but she never came to get them, and
they were sent off like the rest to have
their secrets revealed in the great
morgue at Washington.
Finally there came an envelope adj
dressed TO "the clerks of the New York
Post-office," and it was opened by the
first person in that category into whose
hands it came. That person read the
Enclosure hurriedly through, and called
a convention, to which he read the fol-
lowing:
Although it is directly against the rules of
ttIC oluCC l. b1hC Ii 1CSDouSlullEIY VI SIdLl~
flying your curiosity. Nine letters addressed
to Maria H.. Russell have come t. my hands.
Each one contained a brief note, calling at
tention to an i%nclosure, without date or sig
nature. Each inclosure was a five-dollar
bill. We have a great deal of curiosity our
selves here to learn something about this
strange matter. Won't some OF you write
us what you know? And if any further dis
closures are made we will inform you.
Here was q omanc indeed, Nine
unsigned letters, each with a similar in
closure of money. Was it possible,
they thought. that for thirty years these
same sort of letters, with the same in
closures, had been coming to Maria
Russell. And why didn't they stop, if
she was dead, as she certainly aust be.
The whole post, office was excited and
perplexed in its efforts to find a solu-
ton of this mystery. But there was no
clew to Mrs. or Miss Russell; no clew to
her mysterious correspondent. / can
not repeal the many theories that were
advanced, or the many speculations that
were put out to explain the matter; but
each was a different one, and each had
as good ground for believing, his the
true one as any other, because none of
them had any ground at all. To add to
the mystery, some one brought in a
daily paper which contained the follow
ing advertisement:
DERSONAL-ANY PERSON HAVING ANY
l.. knowledge of the whereabouts of Maria H.
Russell, who has been a resident of this city for
thirty years, will relieve a terrible anxiety by
communicating with c. 3. r., Post-otice.
What a sensation that personal made
in the Post-Of1ice Department. Here
at last was a clew to the unknown cor
respondent who was wondering why he
had received no acknowledgement to
his letters for nine months; and to add
to the excitement another letter, in the
same pale-yellow style of envelope, ad-
dressed in the same similar chirogra-
ply, was tossed with hundreds of others
to the distributors table, where it came
to light. Fifty letters were addressed
to &C. B. r." each of which stated
that they had important information
concerning Maria H. Russell; but be-
fore many OF them were mailed it leak
ed out that the personal was put in the
papers by one of the clerks, who hoped
to reach in advance of his fellows u clew
to the mystery. But nothing satisfac-
tory resulted even from the personal.
Several Maria Russell's turned up to
answer it, and were very much disgust
ed to find they weren'tthe person want
ed; but it brought no clew to the curl
Gus old lady and her curious correspond
ent.
Four. five, six years went by, and
each month brought as regularly as the
month came round q letter for Maria
FL. Russell. The reverence with which
these letters were treated was a new
feature in the POst-office Department.
1t was a satisfaction even to handle
them, and feel of the thin, limpsy en-
closure, and with what agony of inter-
est they were advertised, and finally
sent away to the Dead-letter Office each
thirty days to be deposited with the
others just like them that had gone be-
fore.
One day nearly two years ago a clerk
in the poSt-ofii1e told a friend who was
connected with 4 newspaper of the cir
cumstances, and "a brief statement of
facts was published. The paragraph
was widely quoted--republished in al
most every paper in the United States.
And with this publication the letters
stopped coming. The lastone was post
marked March 4, 1875. It is thought
that the mysterious correspondent saw
the paragraph, and knew in that way
that Maria Russell was dead-for she
must be dead, or she would have called
for her letters in the years that had
gone since she got the last.
But it may be asked why the un-
known correspondent doesn't send to
the Dead-letter Office and claim his
m~oney-the money he sent so faithfully
each month to Maria Russell, even for
ten years after she was dead and gone.
A large number of claims have been
made for the money since the publica-
ton last year, and a variety of singular
stories have been told to account for the
manner in which the correspondence
was conducted.
One man wrote to inform the Post
office Department that he was the per-
SON who had been sending the money
to Maria Russell these forty years agone,
but as his manuscript vas in every way