Post Haste: A Tale of Her Majesty's Mails — Robert Michael Ballantyne / R.M. Ballantyne

Preface.This tale is founded chiefly on facts furnished by thePostmaster-General's Annual Reports, and gathered, during personalintercourse and investigation, at the General Post-Office of London andits Branches.It is intended to illustrate--not by any means to exhaust--the subjectof postal work, communication, and incident throughout the Kingdom.I have to render my grateful acknowledgments to SIR ARTHUR BLACKWOOD;his private secretary, CHARLES EDEN, ESQUIRE; and those other officersof the various Departments who have most kindly afforded me everyfacility for investigation, and assisted me to much of the informationused in the construction of the tale.If it does not greatly enlighten, I hope that it will at all eventsinterest and amuse the reader.R.M. BALLANTYNE.CHAPTER ONE.A HERO AND HIS WORSHIPPER.Once upon a time--only once, observe, she did not do it twice--a widowof the name of Maylands went, in a fit of moderate insanity, and took upher abode in a lonely, tumble-down cottage in the west of Ireland.Mrs Maylands was very poor. She was the widow of an English clergyman,who had left her with a small family and the smallest income that wascompatible with that family's maintenance. Hence the migration toIreland, where she had been born, and where she hoped to liveeconomically.The tumble-down cottage was near the sea, not far from a little baynamed Howlin Cove. Though little it was a tremendous bay, with mightycliffs landward, and jutting ledges on either side, and forbidding rocksat the entrance, which waged continual warfare with the great Atlanticbillows that rolled into it. The whole place suggested shipwreck andsmugglers.