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One of the most striking & familiar illustrations is in the arrangements of letter lists at the post offices.

A list - alphabetically arranged & numbered - is hung up containing the arrivals by each mail from each direction and the letters are kept in apartments by days in place of by letters, so that unless you search through a long series of lists very carefully & give the exact number of your letter to a clerk you cannot hope to get a letter.

As frequently occurs, a letter or package will be overlooked and not entered on the list, in which case it is sheer accident if the owner ever hears of it again. At Guadalajara I had a half dozen packages in the office for over a month that were not entered on the list, and the clerks all said there were no such packages for me; yet when I had ordered another set of articles, thinking the first were lost, the latter were produced