IN POST HASTE.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18555, 30 April 1930, Page 9

IN POST HASTE.

ODD FINDS IN PILLAR BOXES. A pound and a-half of bacon, £2OO in cash, an odd cheque or two, a diamond engagement ring, horn-rimmed spectacles, theatre tickets, pay envelopes, wallets, watches, tobacco pouches. Lists of articles which absent-minded citizens deposit in suburban and city letter pillars, look like the beginnings of a "nimble shilling” store (says a writer in a Melbourne paper). All kinds of queer articles are found when postmen sort their collection® from letter pillars, and by some maglo of the department, they are nearly always returned to their owners. Wallets are most easily placed. Nearly always they contain some clue t® their owner’s identity, and a telephone ring brings him to the post office, wher® he is glad to retrieve what the warmhearted thief, who placed it in th® pillar box for him, has left. Pillar boxes reveal that pocket-pick-ing is easiest In the ’vinter, the season of crowded trams and covering overcoats. The receiver outside Spencer street station, Melbourne, where crowds mingle before the departure of interstate expresses, is the most prolific yielder. Generally, too, the wallets contain train tickets for Sydney. It was not left, however, for postmen to discover two £SO notes and a city firm’s bank passbook. The girl clerk who posted them remembered her mistake when she reached the Collins Street Bank and attempted to deposit with the teller two dozen circulars and three demands for overdue bills. Romance entered a city postman’s round when he opened a Bourke Street box and was attracted by a glittering diamond ring in a dark corner. By the time he had completed his round and reached the central office, however, he found waiting for him an excited young man, accompanied by a girl, to whom he had intended posting a proposal. Instead, he had posted the ring he had bought in his optimism, and when it was lost he had no hesitation in telling her what he had found so difficult in ordinary circumstances. But it was all in the day’s work to the postman. Since then he has handed to grateful ownehs monthly train tickets, fountain pens, cigarette cases, and all the rest of the things people post when they are hurrying to work or home. It’s not what people post that worries the collectors; it’s what they say they posted.