Mail Robbers

Attached to the United States Mail service is a corps of wiltod and keen-eyed detectives, wliose exploits are seldom recorded in the columns of the newspapera, bui who perform no small part in the safe conduct of the postal arrangmcnts of the country. The men who compose the corps knovrn as postoffice inspectora. They are sometimos confounded with the agents of the United States Service Bureau, but are in fact of an entirely distinct and separate organixation, having not even a remote conntction with the lattcr. New York is the most fruitful Geld for the postofiice inspector to exorcist his genius. The headquartera of the corps was fornierly situated at the southeast corner of the Federal building, up one flight of stairs, but recently, on account of the public character of the situation, the bureau was transferred to two large apartmenta on the fourth floor, where the work oí the office is carried on free from the noise of the street and intrusión of the public. Every coniplaint which comes to the postmaster of letters which have never found their destinatiou is reíerred to tlie inspector for his thoiough examination. Xot a day goos by in which there are not several complaints of thisdesoription, andconsequeutly tlie inspectora hands are full with the liundreds of cases which accumulate so rapidly as to overburden his desk. It is said of a greatexpresscompany that it never permits a dishonest employé to go unpunished, even if it should require years of high-priced detective skill in which to nunt him down, no matter how small may be the amount of loss which the company has sufïered. Records show that t his express company haspursued a thieving servant for twenty years before a capture was effected. The United States Government is scarcely less relentlesí with the robbers of the mails, but it seldom takes so long a time to corner the culprit. There is no branch ofpublicorprivate industry wheredishonesty issocertain of ultímate detection as in the United States postal service. A single theft may possibly escape notice, but a succession of thefts will make the theft's apprehension but aquestion of time. The postoffice inspector is always a quiet, gentlemanly person. His dress is that of a wellto-do business man. There is nothing about himof thedetectiveof fiction or the drama. He is familiar with the faces of hundreds of the subordinates of the office, few of whom know him even by sight. His presente is always dreaded. One of the inspectora attached to the New York postofiice told a News reporter one day someol the methods used in the detection of crimináis in the service. The narrator is a tal!, slender personage, of perhaps forty years, who has passed the major part ot his life in the postal service, having been in the postofiice in Boston, in the railway mail service between Boston and this city, and later an inspector in charge of the Southern división Ofthedepartment. A keen, dark eye and shrewd Yankee face are all that distingutsh him from the thousands one meets in elbowing one's way through crowded Broadway. He said: "Wben a clerk or letter carrier once begins to pilfer trom the mails henever stops un til arrested. Upon that fact dependa the certainty ofhis apprehension sooner or later. The chief weapon upon which we rely for catching the ei -iniinal is the decoy letter, in which is inclosed a marked bill or bilis. I could teil nmny an interestin;; experience in that connection." Tlie inspector then took from a capacions pockutbook a $1 United States Treasury note well marked in blueink. "I have," he continuad, "caugbt ten thievea with this particular bilí. Soniflhow, I do not know why, there is a certain fatality connected with marked bilis, and if I put one marked and two unmarked bilis in a letter which is stolen, the thief seldom spends the one which is su re to cause his detection. "1 lost the other day, howtver, a $1 bill which caused the arrest of over forty clerks and letter-carriers. It was literally covered with private marks. I placed in it a decoy letter with ono marked bill to catch a fellow attached to an tiptown oilire. When I arrested the man I found this note Ihave ir. my hand, but the other was gone. I offered to give him $10, if he wouiö teil me where he spent it, but he