The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

256 LIFE OF SIR ROWLAND HILL. [1851-4
which chinks it up and tosses it over with a bounce ; the housewife's
hand, which has a lingering propensity to keep some of it back, and
to drive a bargain by not paying in the last shilling or so of the sum
for which her order is obtained ; the quick, the slow, the coarse, the
fine, the sensitive and dull, the ready and unready they are always
at the grating all day long. Hovering behind the owners of these
hands, observant of the various transactions in which , they engage,
is a tall constable (rather potential with the matrons and widows on
account of his portly aspect), who assists the bewildered female
public, explains the nature of the printed forms put ready to be filled
up for the quicker issuing of orders and the greater exactness as
to names, and has an eye on the unready one, as he knots his money
up in a pocket-handkerchief or crams it into a greasy pocket-book.
If you have any bad money by you, be careful not to it bring here.
The portly constable will whisk you into a back office before you can
say Jack Robinson, will snip your bad half-crown or five-shilling
piece in half directly, and (at the best), after searching inquiry, will
******
fold the pieces in a note of your name and address, and consign
them to a bundle of similar trophies for evermore.
"
This sort of mystification is even more surprising than that
under which certain uneducated individuals (Irish) have been known
to labour. The belief has more than once been manifested at a
money order office window that the mere payment of the commission
would be sufficient to procure an order for five pounds ; the form of
paying in the five pounds being deemed purely optional. An Irish
gentleman (who had left his hod at the door) recently applied in
Aldersgate Street for an order for five pounds on a Tipperary post
office; for which he tendered (probably congratulating himself on
having hit upon so good an investment) sixpence. It required a
lengthened argument to prove to him that he would have to pay the
five pounds into the office before his friend could receive that small
amount
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in Tipperary; and he went away, after all, evidently convinced
that his not having this order was one of the personal wrongs
of Ireland, and one of the particular injustices done to hereditary
bondsmen only.
"
Despite the prodigious increase in the business of the depart-
ment which we have pointed out, its efficiency has been doubled,
and its cost almost halved. By superseding seventy-eight superfluous
ledgers, the labour of sixty clerks has been saved; by simply
reducing the size of the money orders and advices, the expense of