“ ‘Now, are you going to get in?’ said the person who had addressed my uncle before. He was dressed as a mail guard, with a wig on his head and most enormous cuffs to his coat, and had a lantern in one hand, and a huge blunderbuss in the other, which he was going to stow away in his little arm-chest. ‘ Are you going to get in, Jack Martin?’ said the guard, holding the lantern to my uncle’s face.

“ ‘Hallo!’ said my uncle, falling back a step or two. ‘That’s familiar!’

“ ‘It’s so on the waybill,’ said the guard.

“ ‘Isn’t there a “Mister” before it?’ said my uncle. For he felt, gentlemen, that for a guard he didn’t know, to call him Jack Martin, was a liberty which the Post Office wouldn’t have sanctioned if they had known it.

“ ‘No, there is not,’ rejoined the guard coolly.