Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 January 1878 — The Dead-Letter Office. [ARTICLE]

The Dead-Letter Office.

The Dead-Letter Office is an interesting place to visit; not at all like a livingletter office, but a large room containing many tables at which sit clerks examining, sorting and arranging the piles of correspondence that have come to naught. Some open letters, which are then passed to others for examination, when those containing money are passed on to clerks whose duty it is to make a memorandum ot the contents. Then the whole is freshly reinclosed to return to the sender; ana, in case it doesn’t find him, it comes back to Washington. It is interesting to see the contents of the moneyed letters. Small pieces of silver and currency are plentiful, and sometimes a bit of silver will have a piece of currency wrapped around it, so carefully ! The bank-notes range from $1 to S2O, and perhaps higher, but that was the largest one we saw. Who would be so careless as to let a S2O note go astray ? It must have been lovely woman; for the direction on all the letters we glanced at was in feminine chirography. The many articles which have failed to find an owner and have returned to the Dead-Letter Office, such as jewelry, embroideries, and all the little things that are sent by mail, were until recently kept on exhibition, and formed quite a curious museum; but they ore now packed away preparatory to being sold at auction.— Washington Cor. of the Hartford Times.