all the custom-house characteristics were to be
found reproduced upon a smaller scale—the
post-office of Cattivacane.

When any of my friends in England chose
to remember that I, the individual, was alive,
and out foreign, and were good enough to
write to me, their letters, after having paid a
prodigious outward postage in England—
after having been fumigated with nauseous
odours in abominable lazarettos, scorched,
branded with hot irons, blistered, punctured
with needles, and cut through and through
with scissors, greased, stamped all over with
illegible gibberish in many-coloured inks,
blackened, defaced, and crumpled—were,
long after the time of their due delivery,
brought to Cattivacane, when, if they were
not thrown overboard in the passage of the
boat from the ship to the shore, or eaten by
the rats, or stolen, or used by the sailors
for pipe-lights, they were transferred to
our disgraceful little post-office, to await
the persons to whom they were addressed
coming to claim them. There were no post
men in the wretched place. There was no
delivery; and all that could be done was to
make periodical voyages of discovery to the
post-office, and hunt diligently among the
letters, rags, shavings, sacks, and baskets, till
you found the missive addressed to you.
Plenty of letters directed to Malta, Syria,
Gallipoli, and even Constantinople, were
always to be found among our letters; as to
newspapers, they were kicking about the
Levant for months—mere flotsams and
jetsams of journalism; and report did say, that
if a resident of Cattivacane were disappointed
in receiving an expected communication, he
not unfrequeutly indemnified himself by
appropriating as many letters and newspapers,
addressed to other places, as he could find.

There were almost as many difficulties in
sending letters to England as in receiving
them. You had first to hunt for the postmaster,
who, when he was not asleep, was
hunting fleas, or smoking, or fuddling himself
with rosolio, but lying and swindling always,
Then, when you had recovered from the
pestiferous odour of rank oil, garlic, and tobacco
smoke which ordinarily hung about this
government officer (what a government and
what an officer!), you had the pleasure of
struggling with him as one might struggle
with wild beasts at Ephesus, about the date
of the mail-steamers calling for letters, and
specially about the amount of homeward
postage. Much screaming in that horrible
compound of Italian, French, Romaic,
Turkish, and thieves' Latin, known as Lingua
Franca; much violent gesticulation; much
expectoration; and, in many cases, threats of
personal violence; were always necessary
before a letter could be definitely posted at
Cattivacane. The altercations I have had
witii that postmaster make me tingle with
irritation even now. He cheated like a
thimble-rigger; he perjured himself like a
witness in a running-down case; yet withal
at last, he cringed like one of Mr. Van
Amburg's wild animals after he has been well
chastised with the crowbar, and, wishing to
rend him, fawns upon him pitifully. The
chief cause of dispute between myself and the
postmaster was the (by him considered
undue), amount of manuscript that I chose to
send for a single rate of postage. I happen
to write a very small, cramped, microscopic
hand, and I ordinarily use, when abroad, the
very thinnest of foreign letter-paper. It
used to cause the knavish postmaster of
Cattivacane the most exquisite annoyance to
have to receive and weigh my letters—to see
through the transparent envelope the close-
set lines crossed and re-crossed—to feel how
many sheets of paper, closely written upon,
there were inside, and yet to know that the
amount of postage chargeable upon this vast
quantity of written matter was ridiculously
small. I always got the best of him in
argument and action; but only after the abuse,
gesticulation, and threats of which I have
made mention. His favourite objection—
dancing, screaming, and pawing the air
meanwhile was, "Troppa scrittura Kyrie Ingliz
—Troppa scrittura! " (too much writing, Oh,
English Lord—too much writing!) by which
I suppose he meant that I wrote too small
a hand to satisfy the revenue of the
government: that there was too much writing in,
my letters, and for too little money.

Now this brief objection, troppa scrittura
(to explain the origin of which I have inflicted
on you the foregoing little apologue), appears
to me applicable to many other things
besides closely-written letters. Frequently,
watching the world as it wags, and the
dupers and duped walking up and down, and
going to and fro on it, I find persons, institutions,
books, that tempt me sorely to call out
troppa scrittura!—too much writing! The
eighteenth of Gloriana, cap six, see four, with
its endless be it further enacted and provided
always, will make me cry out, almost
disloyally, troppa scrittura. The filling of five
columns of a newspaper for which I have
paid fivepence, with the five thousand names
of the noble and honourable personages who
attended Gloriana's last levee (Long may she
reign!), all of whose names I have seen five
thousand times before, and never want to see
again; the correspondence in which I am at
present engaged with her Majesty's
Postmaster-General relative to the banknote I
sent by post last Christmas twelvemonth,
and which never reached its destination, and
which correspondence, bound, would make a
handsome folio volume already; the novels,
tales, romances, essays and facetious sketches
sent to me as editor of the Boomerang,
monthly magazine, for perusal; the
abominable mass of roundhand MS. written on
folio foolscap and stitched with green ferret,
which Messrs. De Murrey and Plee have sent
me, and call their bill of costs;—these, and a