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Show UNCLE SAM USES MILLIONS OF SACKS Uncle Sam has twenty-eight different differ-ent kinds of mall bags In service and they range in cost from 22 cents to J21.5C each. There are mall pouche6 for almost every conceivable use, and you can ship almost anything that comes within the postal regulations with a minimum of loss and breakage. Probably the most peculiar mail bag Is the ono arranged for carrying bee3. Sending bees bymall was a difficult operation op-eration before the "bee bag" was adopted. Usually the bees arrived at their destination dead or fo near exhausted ex-hausted that they wore of little use. Now these little honey makers an bo shipped by mall several thousand miles In the 'bee bag" without suffering, suffer-ing, and can obtain air with a good supplv of food during their transit Mall bags are made of various materials. ma-terials. The cheapest arc of cotton and the most costly of leather. Those used on fast expresses are reinforced with motol so that they can be flung from the fast moving trains without damage. Even then these bags, or "catcher pouches," do not last more than a year und a half, while some of the cotton bags used for the work will remain in service upward of ten years. In parts of the west, where the mail must be carried for many miles on horseback, special jtouches are in use for slinging over the animal's Hanks. In the far frozen north special bags are made for sled transportation, and in the cities a bag in use for pneumatic pneu-matic tube service Is made of a composition com-position called ' leatheroid." The ordinary or-dinary cotton mail bags are woven so closely that they are practically waterproof, and In the weave there are thirteen stripes of blue. Each country marks its own mall pouches in Borne Individual way, so that If one gets lost in a far country Its ownership owner-ship can be readily detected. Nearly C5.000.0u0 mail bags arc used each year by the whole country, and as they are being worn out nil the time the supply has to be kept up. There are mail bag hospitals where lens of thousands of them are going ecry week. One such mall bag hospital hos-pital repairs upward of 5.000 a day. These crippled bags are In all sorts of dilapidated conditions. A railroad wreck may injure several hundreds or thousands, and these must all go to the hospital before entering active life again. ' ChrlKtmas is responsible for much damage to the mail bags owing to the hard service they get, and immediately im-mediately arter the midwinter holiday season several hundred thousand bags go to the hospital?. Mall bags are the most traveled of all articles In use today. They are constantly moving, and it would be impossible to estimate the number of miles a bag ten years old has traveled trav-eled Harper's Weekly. |