are missing! Our friends must take on the role of detective to trace the mysterious disappearance. Though the British Post-Office at this time delivered in good condition over fourteen hundred million letters, a half-dozen important ones addressed to Messr. In the 1800 s, guaranteeing a letter to delivery was a bit of a challenge, as Phillip Maylands, his sister Mary, and their friend George Aspel quickly find out. Item #12657 ISBN: 1934554170 "In this fun adventure in merry, old England, the reader is taken back to the beginning days of the General Post-Office, learning about the founding of the mail system. Spine straight, binding tight, pages clean and bright. Frontispiece "Distribution of Her Majesty's Mails" May have other B&W illustrations. Title, with gilt line above and beneath, and a Scotch Thistle emblem in gilt on front. This title the cloth boards are Navy which represents Europe.
#POST HASTE TRAVEL SERIES#
Each color of cloth boards in this series represents which geographic region the story is located in. San Antonio, TX: The Vision Forum, Inc., 2008. Post Haste A Tale of Her Majesty's Mails R.M. Come to think of it, I don’t remember the last time I heard anyone say chop-chop.Įxcept when ordering a gin and tonic, of course.Ballantyne, R.
And hardly anybody goes hell for leather nowadays. I haven’t heard anyone say posthaste for a long time. I had a head-strong dog once that made an exasperating career out of escaping our back yard and running away “hell-bent for leather.” I admit that I harbored a few dark thoughts about her future from time to time. Hell-bent for leather refers to a cow that was so hard to handle that the wrangler considered slaughtering it and converting it into leather. The former refers to an arduous walk through rugged terrain, one that usually destroyed the man’s shoes. “Hell for leather,” on the other hand, is often confused with hell-bent for leather. “Hey, sweetheart, bring me another gin and tonic, chop-chop!” “Chop-chop” itself would probably have never gained a foothold if Canton hadn’t been flooded with English sailors who found the phrase useful. Chop-chop comes from Canton Chinese meaning, hurry-hurry.Ĭanton, of course, was a major Chinese seaport and the eastern terminus of the ancient Silk Road, a mercantile travel route that brought silk and other valuable commodities from China and Japan to Europe. Synonyms for posthaste include apace, briskly, double quick, fleetly, chop-chop and hell for leather. Shakespeare liked the phrase and used it in a scene from “Richard II”: “Old John of Gaunt hath sent post haste to entreat your majesty to visit him.” In another play, Cassio says to Othello, “the Duke requires your post haste appearance.” Maybe to encourage his horse to greater speed if a Comanche war party was hot on his heels. I can’t imagine that any of those hard-riding mailmen ever uttered the phrase, posthaste, however. We did the same thing later in America and called it the Pony Express. Delivering an urgent letter back then required galloping through the dark of night and changing horses frequently to get the job done “posthaste.” A courier on horseback was called a post. What antique chapter of language history did a phrase like “post haste” come from? Someone asked me to do something the other day, and then suggested I do it “posthaste.” No way could I let that go unchallenged.
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