MAIL FROM BRITISH
ISLES IN ONE WEEK.
LUSITANIA'S FAST TIME MAKES
THIS RECORD POSSIBLE.
Pouches Which Left London Last
Saturday Are Due Here
at 6 o'clock Today --
A New Record.
Considerable interest is manifested in the postoffice over the chances of getting the Lusitania's mails in at 5:30 tonight. If this is done, it will be the first time one Saturday's British post has got this far West by the following Saturday.
"I think it will be managed," said Postmaster J. H. Harris yesterday, after consulting his schedules. "The Lusitania made the port of New York at 3 o'clock this morning, giving her five hours to transfer her mails. Those mails left for the West at 8 o'clock this morning. They are due in this postoffice at 5:50 Saturday afternoon. It will be a record for trans-Atlantic pouches."
American mails from England, Scotland, and Wales have an exciting time of it. They may not start from the big centers, such as London, Newcastle, Sheffield, Birmingham, Nottingham, where the curtains are made; Edinburgh or Glasgow till the very hour that the steamers are sailing from Liverpool, yet they catch the boat. While the ship is making her way down the Irish channel leisurely, so as to get off Cork harbor, for the Queenstown passengers, in daylight, as those passengers go out to the liner on board a small tender, the mails are rushed to Liverpool by fast trains, hurried directly over the comparatively narrow channel to Dublin, and then sent South as fast as trains can rush them.
In this manner they get to Queenstown before the tender shoves off to steam out to the big liner. On arriving at this side fast tugs meet the liner about ten miles down the bay from New York. The mails are thrown overboard to the tugs and these little vessels, able to make short cuts over shallow places and dodge in and about shipping, have the mails either in the general postoffice at New York or on the Western bound trains long before the liner is docked. In that way it is expected that mails which left London last Saturday at 6 o'clock in the evening may reach here tonight at about the same hour.
