The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Uncertain Mail
I'VE seen a good deal in the newspapers from time to time with reference to the certainty that if you drop a letter into the mail box at the corner of your street, it will be delivered to the proper person; but I don't believe it.
I feel somewhat as Mark Twain said he did regarding the notice of his death which he read in a country newspaper; I think the reports have been greatly exaggerated. I've read something to the effect that not more than one letter out of a million ultimately goes astray, and that that one has a good chance of being run to cover by some epistolary sleuth in the dead letter office; but I've watched the thing, and I'll have to be shown.
I had a few hours of unexpected leisure one day last summer, and feeling more than ordinarily kindly toward the human race I used it to write to a few of the undergraduates who, it seemed to me, had done something that merited attention or was worthy of praise. When I had finished there were fifteen or twenty in all. The summer dragged on, and I was made happy by receiving two acknowledgments, one from McKinley, ashy little country freshman, and a gracious pleasant one from Bullard whom most people at first sight might have thought crude. I should scarcely have expected either to reply.
Now the thing that convinces me that all this talk about the reliability of the mails is wrong is the fact that I did not hear from those other eighteen letters.
Take Burton, for example, who won the western tennis championship. I'm sure that if he had received my congratulations, he would at least have acknowledged the note. He comes from a part of the country where they are fed on courtesy and good form three times a day, and he has an aunt who belongs to the Daughters of the American Revolution. A man with a past like that behind him couldn't neglect to acknowledge a simple little note.
There was Stephens, who is really a nice boy and who won the high average in Engineering and was given ninety-three in Rhetoric 1 by an instructor who came from Harvard; and Carlton who was elected to senior society and has had three years of uninterrupted training at sorority open houses; and Fulton whose uncle wrote a book and who is a prize athlete over whom seven organizations went crazy when he entered, and who finally joined the only first class fraternity in college—I'm sure the notes I wrote them were lost in the mails, or I should have heard from them.
Nancy says that I'm wrong in blaming the government, and that probably all these men got the letters that I wrote and failed to answer them through ignorance or carelessness just as some fellows keep their hats on when they talk to a woman, or fail to call after they've been invited to dinner, but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.
October