The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

1851-4] MONEY ORDERS. 255
number, for something over ^"16,000; but in the month of
December, 1851, the number of orders issued was more than
367,000, for ,690,000. That is to say, during that single month
twice as many orders were taken out and paid for than were issued
and paid in 1840 during the whole year.
******
"The Central Money Order Office in which these remarkable
results have been produced and ascertained is in Aldersgate Street,
London, hard by the Post Office. It is a large establishment large
enough to be a very considerable post office in itself with extensive
cellarage branching off into interminable groves of letters of advice
and receipts, all methodically arranged for reference. The room in
which the orders are issued and paid has a flavour of Lombard
Street and money. It has its long banker's counter, where clerks sit
behind iron gratings, with their wooden bowls of cash, and their little
scales for weighing gold; and vistas of pigeon-holes stretch out
behind them which are not without their pigeons, as we shall
presently see. Here, from ten o'clock to four, keeping the swing
doors on the swing all day, all sorts and conditions of people come
and go. Greasy butchers and salesmen from Newgate Market, with
bits of suet in their hair, who loll, and lounge, and cool their
foreheads against the grating, like a good-humoured sort of bears ;
sharp little clerks not long from school, who have everything
requisite and necessary in readiness ; older clerks in shooting coats,
a little sobered down as to official zeal, though possibly not yet as to
cigar divans and betting offices ; matrons who will go distractedly
wrong, and whom no consideration, human or divine, will induce to
declare in plain words what they have come for ; people with small
children, which they perch on edges of remote desks, where the
children, supposing themselves to be for ever abandoned and lost,
present a piteous spectacle ; labouring men, merchants, half-pay
officers, retired old gentlemen from trim gardens by the New River,
excessively impatient of being trodden on, and very persistent as to
the poking in of their written demands with tops of canes and
handles of umbrellas. The clerks in this office ought to rival the
lamented Sir Charles Bell in their knowledge of the expression of
the hand. The varieties of hands that hover about the grating, and
are thrust through the little doorways in it, are a continual study for
them or would be, if they had any time to spare, which assuredly
they have not." The coarse-grained hand which seems all thumb
and knuckle, and no nail, and which takes up money or puts it down
with such an odd, clumsy, lumbering touch ;
the retail trader's hand,