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found to be dangerous, as the suc- tion between the boats would draw them together with a bump equal to a collision. After trying various methods, it was finally decided to employ three carriers to do the work in eight hour shifts, and to furnish them with a small, stout, clinker- built row boat, fitted with strong, light lines of about eighty feet in length attached to the stem, the line to be coiled in the bow, and its end thrown to the passing ship to be made fast, while the remainder of the eighty feet leaped out of the bow to fetch up and drag the row- boat and carrier alongside to ex- change the mail. This might be easy for a boatman to do, but the pros- pect of a steamer's big black bow looming over him, coming full speed, and pushing a wall of water fifty feet across right at him and his little cockle-shell, would make the ordinary mail carrier used to shore work faint away, and even forget that he knew how to swim. Possibly, after the first few attempts, he might gather courage enough to get Wri loviia jit Moise CiSiemnee or ene steamers, but this would be delaying the United States mail; so three prectical boatmen, accustomed to river work, were put through the civil service examination, and it was arranged that the little white steamer was now to tow them out to the passing ships, and make their deliveries sure under all conditions and in all kinds of weather. Thus the little white steamer is the floating postoffice, and the men in the small boat towing behind are the carriers who handle the mail of the passing fleet. Now and then comes a lull in the business and the steamer returns to her berth at one of the city docks some few hundred feet above the Woodward landing of the Windsor ferries. It does not spend much time at the dock, how- ever; only a few minutes, now and then, to receive the bundles of letters, rolls, and papers, and to start on their way similar letters and parcels that have been taken off TELESCOPE Page 127 the passing ships. Hardly has the reversing propeller swung her alongside, and the light line been looped over a peg in the wharf with its two ends in a half- hitch on the bitts aboard, made ready for instant slipping, when a wiry-looking carrier, clothed in gray, emerges from the low cabin, and stepping lightly from the pipe railing aboard to the dock, remarks, "It is three o'clock. I think I will see what there is upstairs." He walks rapidly to an outside stairway near-by, leading up to a windowed balcony overlooking and commanding a view of the river as far as one can see in either direction. Inside these balcony windows is the marine branch of the main postoffice, in charge of two clerks, who. look after the handling of the nine collections and deliveries from the main office each day. Here the mail is handled in the ordinary way, except that no letters are received unless they are intended for some ship. On the back of each letter the name of the ves- sel for which it is intended is marked in large letters, so that the Carrier who delivers it on the river may lose no time in deciphering a blind address. The mail boat comes in from the river as often as possible, in order that the mail be placed aboard of her. A few minutes after the car- rier's disappearance through the balcony door, another figure (the captain of this interesting boat) steps out of the wheel-house, . and adjusting a pair of marine glasses to his eyes, looks intently for a moment toward the distance up the river, where the down-bound ships first come into view around Belle Isle. Standing out sharp and clear is a large steamer with four masts and a red band around her black smoke stack. The white deck-houses show clear above the black hull, and she pushes a billow of water in front as she comes at full speed, sweeping rapidly past a slower steamer towing three barges. Behind, in the distance, just showing thru