One evening Phil sat in the sorting-room of the General Post-Office with his hand to his head—for the eight o’clock mail was starting; his head, eyes, and hands had been unusually active during the past two hours, and when the last bundle of letters dropped from his fingers into the mail-bags, head, eyes, and hands were aching.

 

A row of scarlet vans was standing under a platform, into which mail-bags, apparently innumerable, were being shot. As each of these vans received its quota it rattled off to its particular railway station, at the rate which used, in the olden time, to be deemed the extreme limit of “haste, haste, post haste.” The yard began to empty when eight o’clock struck. A few seconds later the last of the scarlet vans drove off; and about forty tons of letters, etcetera, were flying from the great centre to the circumference of the kingdom.

 

Phil still sat pressing the aching fingers to the aching head and eyes, when he was roused by a touch on the shoulder. It was Peter Pax, who had also, by that time, worked his way upwards in the service.

 

“Tired, Phil?” asked Pax.

 

“A little, but it soon passes off,” said Phil lightly, as he rose. “There’s no breathing-time, you see, towards the close, and it’s the pace that kills in everything.”

 

“Are you going to Pegaway Hall to-night?” asked Pax, “because, if so, I’ll go with you, bein’, so to speak, in a stoodious humour myself.”

 

“No, I’m not going to study to-night,—don’t feel up to it. Besides, I want to visit Mr Blurt. The book he lent me on Astronomy ought to be returned, and I want to borrow another.—Come, you’ll go with me.”

 

After exchanging some books at the library in the basement, which the man in grey had styled a “magnificent institootion,” the two friends left the Post-Office together.

 

“Old Mr Blurt is fond of you, Pax.”

 

“That shows him to be a man of good taste,” said Pax, “and his lending you and me as many books as we want proves him a man of good sense. Do you know, Phil, it has sometimes struck me that, what between our Post-Office library and the liberality of Mr Blurt and a few other friends, you and I are rather lucky dogs in the way of literature.”

 

“We are,” assented Phil.

 

“And ought, somehow, to rise to somethin’, some time or other,” said Pax.

 

“We ought—and will,” replied the other, with a laugh.

 

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