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Show LIVE NEWS. "News!" The purveyor of press information at Washington, D. 0., is to be pitied, seeing that last night he was under the painful necessity of telegraphing, tele-graphing, as nacs, a paragraph concerning con-cerning the dead letter office, extracted from a lato issue of an eastern literary journal. The above appeared in our issuo of Sunday morning last, and has called forth comments which impel us to give the facts in full. The telegram referred refer-red to, as it appeared in the Herald, and was received over the wires, stood thus: Washington, 24. Nearly three million mil-lion letters went to the dead letter office of-fice last year. They were partly classified classi-fied as follows: 68,000 wi'ii no county or State on the directions; more than 40,000 lacked stamps 3,000 without any address at all; $02,000 in cash, more than 83,000,000 in drafts, checks, i!ce., were found in these letters. It appears that on an average every letter let-ter misdirected, or that goes to the dead letter office from any cause, contains con-tains one dollar. In the "Varieties" of "Applcton's Journal" for Saturday, August 24, which was received in this city by mail early last week, is the following paragraph para-graph : The statistics of tho Dead-Letter offloo givo amazing evidenco of the carelcsne.-s people can be guilty of. Tho number of letters sent to that of-. of-. tico during last year was nearly 3,000,-000. 3,000,-000. Sixty-eight thousand of these letters could not be forwarded owing to the carelesncss of tho writer in omitting omitt-ing to give the county or State; 4,000,-000 4,000,-000 failed to be sent because the writer forgot to put on stamps.and over 3,000 letters were put in the post office without with-out any address whatever. In the letters let-ters above named was found over $02,-WH) $02,-WH) cash, and drafts, checks, etc., to the value of f 3,000,000. This wide-awake and sapient news-gatherer news-gatherer thus takes from a literary magazine, about two weeks after it is published, an item of Washington intelligence, in-telligence, and flashes it over the country coun-try by lightning, nearly a week after it has been received by mail. Is he so ignorant that he docs not know the "Journal" is widely read? Or did he suppose because he copied from a magazine bearing the same date as his dispatch that the fraud would not be detected! Such a person is utterly unfit to occupy the position which he so unworthily fills, and should be promptly discharged. As for the errors in figures, he apparently copied carelessly care-lessly and telegraphed 58,000 for GS,-000, GS,-000, and 40,000 instead of 400,000; but this is nothing unusual. |