Some Strange Letter Carrier Reports
[Baltimore Every Saturday.]
Meeting the letter carriers as they leave the post office with their bulky sacks crowded with letters, one must wonder how they can distribute each and every one to its proper owner, but, bless you! They go further than that. After they have been on a route for a while they can tell much more about a family than they ever do. They know if one of the children is away, if visitors are coming, if any of the relatives are dead, and many other things hardly known to the nearest neighbor. An envelope is nothing but an envelope to you. You may criticise the handwriting and the orthography, but beyond that you care nothing. To the letter carrier it is a book. He knows when father and mother are coming–where a truant boy is—whether the family is respected or not—and Sarah’s beau cannot blind the carrier by getting someone else to direct the envelope.
One day one of the oldest carriers had a letter left over after he had gone his usual round. It was directed to a woman living in a little old house standing back from the street, and as he studied the address he said to himself that he had never had an epistle for her before in all the six or seven years he had been on that route.
The post mark was that of an office in the East, and the carrier mused to himself.
“This is from her son, and she will be crying before I am out of sight.”
He delivered the letter to a white-faced woman of 60, who seemed to be living all alone, and she looked surprised as he placed it in her hand.
‘A letter for me–I haven’t a relative on earth!” she gasped.
But he left it with her.
In about three weeks a second letter came, and the old lady opened the door before the carrier was inside the gate. She did not say that it was from her son, but the carrier knew for all that, and he hoped that the truant boy had settled down for life, and was writing cheerful words and sending aid to his poor old mother. Regularly every three weeks, for half a year or more, there came a fat looking letter for the old woman in the little cabin; and if the letter was a day late her white face at the window reproached the carrier more than words could have done. If it was a day earlier she was at the door to meet him, knowing his step from all others which passed that way.
The other day, when the carrier found the buff envelope, directed in the old, familiar, cramped up hand, he said to himself:
“I will hurry around to-day, for the last time I saw her she seemed ill and weak, and a letter will give her new strength.”
He opened the gate with a bang to give her warning, but no white face appeared at the window, and no hand raised the door-latch. The carrier knocked on the door for the first time, and after a moment a woman opened it and said:
“She is dead, and she hasn’t a relative in the city.”
Among the letters to go to the dead-letter office next week will be one, across whose face is written whole chapters in three words. “Dead not delivered.” An old woman has passed away—a cottage is deserted—a letter returned. The world will see nothing in these simple facts, but yet in them is contained all the sentiment God has ever given to any human heart.
The Cincinnati [OH] Daily Star 2 August 1879: p. 16
Chris Woodyard is the author of The Victorian Book of the Dead, The Ghost Wore Black, The Headless Horror, The Face in the Window, and the 7-volume Haunted Ohio series. She is also the chronicler of the adventures of that amiable murderess Mrs Daffodil in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales. The books are available in paperback and for Kindle. Indexes and fact sheets for all of these books may be found by searching hauntedohiobooks.com. Join her on FB at Haunted Ohio by Chris Woodyard or The Victorian Book of the Dead. And visit her newest blog, The Victorian Book of the Dead.
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