The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-08-22
THE OCEAN POSTAL SERVICE.
The Hard Work of Handling Mail on an
 Ocean Liner

| ocean Liner. Imagine working twelve hours every
 day Tipping letters into cases of pigeon ] holes at the rate of 11,270 an hour, with | the unstable deck of a rolling steamship
 for floor, and keeping this up six and seven days at a stretch. That's what | the sixteen mail clerks comprising the | United States sea post service do for a | living month in and month out. Moreover, they have to work in what is practically an elevator shaft, three
 stories high and about fifteen feet
 square. Ventilation is supplied by
 blowers way down in the hold of the
 ship, which force the air up and out of
 the portholes on the third story, or at tic floor, of the floating post-office
 Electric lights gleam night and day in
 every nook and corner of this elevator
 shaft, for it Is hard enough to decipher
 many of the addresses on the foreign
 mail matter, even in the light of years
 of experience and a luminous imagina
 tion, much less in dismal cabin tween
 decks
 The sea post service, now In it's tenth
 year, has proved such an advantage in
 eXpediting the foreign mails that the
 post-office department Is contemplatin
 the establishment of floating post-of
 fees on two or more Atlantic steamship
 lines. Already five Hamburg-Ameri-
 can, four North German Lloyd and three American liners are equipped with postal facilities, and the Cunarders and
 White Star ships are expected to be the next to carry expert sorters and address readers In the winter season the American and North German Lloyd liners carry two mail clerks apiece The men eat at the first cabin table or in the officers mess, but room on transatlantic liner is so much needed for highpriced passengers and freight traffic that the allowance for the sea postal employees is rather grudgingIy allotted
 usually they are given a small room below the berth deck, lighted and ven tilated by couple of portholes, with low ceilings and narrow berths. Tn this attic or sky parlor, as the clerks call it, the separation racks are placed. These resemble Brobdingnagian pigeon cotes. Each compartment is labeled "New York Boston," "Ohio," "Ja- pam etc, when the vessel is bound thither, and Hamburg" "Berlin." London" 'Norway-Sweden," Rus sia,' etc, when bound for Europe. On one side of the room is a "separa ton table" on which registered packages are sorted, a pair of small scales for them, and stamps for mark ing supplementary mail.
 One deck below reached by narrow way, are the newspaper racks, great iron gridirons with big canvas sacks suspended be- heath Into these pouches the third | and fourth-class mail matter is thrown | with marvellous precision and rapidity. On the bullShead wall a railroad map is placed to guide the sorter if he is bit | uncertain where particular package 1 Is to be thrown.
 A trap-door in the floor leads to the i cellar ot the floating post-ottice, one | leck lower Here the bags of mail are f first deposited when the ship leaves port. As fast as dozen or so are emp fed by the men at the separation table | md distributed in the cases another punch is hauled up. Thus, hour after lour in fair weather and foul, in sum ner and winter the men who earn their bread and butter by facilitating the ex- 'hange of news, of business matters md messages of love or other express lions of the human emotions, toll and oil.
 When the Kaiser Friedrich, which tailed last Thursday from New York, vas in port, J. F. Burke one of the