The Press., 1883-09-27
TELLING sUPERsCRIPTIONS.

If you want 8 position to study human nature without seeing the person." said George w. Stanton, IT,, mail agent, 'you can find it in the railway postal service. The letters man writes are nearly always charac- teristic of this description, and there are as many kind of letters as there are dispositions. The careful painstaking student writes superscription-for of course that is all I have to deal with in letters-p painfully plain with all the requisite shading of the Spen- cerian style. The clerk in a hurry to get off his mail combines good business hand with so much haste that it is impossible to distin- guish his Iowa from Ind. Although the let ters of persons not used to writing them are ddressed in cramped, uneven hand, yet they are generally plain to read, and if their spelling is not too bad their destination is easily surmised. The square tinted and per fumed envelopes which swell up Mondays mail are in delicate little hand but always easy to read. Every few mails we get from New York contain what is known as the ''Dutch brig" Its patch of foreign letters generally directed to the settlers up in the
 
 fellows. Some of the names regular jaw breakers, but of course stations are all that bother me, but whatever else is on the letter, Stat Michigan, Nord Amerika, is invariably somewhere on the envelope. There are gen. erally five or six lines of superscription. The letters which come from the east are evenly and plainly written, as if the sender had leis- ure; but the western letters, while the writ ing is just as good as that upon the eastern letters, look as if the superscription had been written while ready to take a train. Western people show hurry in everything about their letters. Bothersome abbreviations are com mon, as if there was no time 10 write out the full name. In sorting mail in the car haste is imperative, and very often letter is so badly addressed that all I can do is to lay it aside until I've got time to lie down and study, and try to make something out of nothing"
 "How about the amount of mail on different days. It varies considerably, don't it ?" ask ed the reporter.
 "Oh, yes, Monday is the heaviest letter day and Wednesday generally the ightest. Fri day and Saturday gives the heaviest commer- cial mails. The Monday morning mail is so- cial correspondence to great extent, and it is wonderful how it will vary with the wealth CT. A bright, pleasant Sunday will make a comparatively light mail on Monday morning, as people don't stay at home and don't get time to write letters. But let the Sunday be a rainy, disagreeable day, and it seems as if the whole populace spent the day writing to friends. People write more letters in the fall and winter than they do in the summer-the spring is the ightest season. Many more pa- pers are circulated in winter than in summer, as people have more time to read. Core spondents are tired then, you know.
 "There is lots of fun too in the business if it is hard work Its rather amusing to watch the regularity which correspondents often show. I don't notice it in the mails from larger places but up the road where only a few letters come on the train catch on to lots of rackets. There is @ fellow up north at a siding who always brings his mail and puts it on the train. Why can set my watch by that fellow. Its only short time since he commenced to send with such regularity and when he hands the letter to me he gives me wink and a small smile The letter goes to girl on the Central, and the regu- larity with which the replies come back is fair omen, should think, although not much of @ judge myself, that something is going to happen before long.-Grand Rapids | Democrat