the penny post and modern hurry. When Madame de Sévigny, Cowper, Horace
Walpole, Byron, Lamb, and the Carlyles wrote their immortal letters the
world was a leisurely place where there was time to indulge in the luxury
of writing to your friends. And the cost of franking a letter made that
letter a serious affair. If you could only send a letter once in a month or
six months, and then at heavy expense, it became a matter of first-rate
consequence. The poor, of course, couldn't enjoy the luxury of
letter-writing at all. De Quincey tells us how the dalesmen of Lakeland a
century ago used to dodge the postal charges. The letter that came by stage
coach was received at the door by the poor mother, who glanced at the
superscription, saw from a certain agreed sign on it that Tom or Jim was
well, and handed it back to the carrier unopened. In those days a letter
was an event.

Now when you can send a letter half round the globe for a penny, and when
the postman calls half a dozen times a day, few of us take letter-writing
seriously. Carlyle saw that the advent of the penny post would kill the
letter by making it cheap. "I shall send a penny letter next time," he
wrote to his mother when the cheap postage was about to come in, and he
foretold that people would not bother to write good letters when they could
send them for next to nothing. He was right, and the telegraph, the
telephone, and the postcard have completed the destruction of the art of
letter-writing. It is the difficulty or the scarcity of a thing that makes
it treasured. If diamonds were as plentiful as pebbles we shouldn't stoop
to pick them up.

But the case of Bill and Sam and thousands of their comrades to-day is
different. They don't want to write literary letters, but they do want to
tell the folks at home something about their life and the great things of
which they are a part. But the great things are too great for them. They