Addressee: Dead

How long she sat waiting, no one would ever know. In her home in Vermont, a few days before Franklin Pierce was elected President of the 31 United States, she pondered. There had been a lovers' quarrel; her sweetheart was now in the South. She made her decision. In the formal, stilted English of 1852, she began a letter:

"I take my pen in hand and I have meditated long on the propriety in writing to you. Please do not cast from you the one who truly loves you. . . ."

Her letter was never answered; it was never delivered. Somewhere between Vermont and Baltimore it fell victim to one of the mail robberies that plagued the early days of U.S. Postal Service.

It was found last week, its ink faded, its paper crumbling, its plaintive little message flattened by the weight of 89 years. In company with 100 other letters which carried the appeals, hopes, fears and gossip of Americans long dead, it lay hidden between the attic joists of a 130-year-old Philadelphia house. There the mail robbers had retired to examine their loot, extract the money, toss the rest away.

The rich cache of personal history which the robbers left behind was discovered by two young artists renovating the house. Beneath the dust and grime of a century, Mr. and Mrs. James Heugh found three ripped canvas mail sacks. Letters lay strewn among the joists, the seals broken, envelopes and messages separated helter-skelter. Some of them:

> A report to Washington from a frantic Army officer, presumably at a fort on the Canadian border, saying that his post had only 37 privates left and needed reinforcements before winter set in.

> The will of Ezekiel Eldridge of Vermont, leaving his estate to his daughter.

> A sales letter to a prospect in Petersburg, Va., in which a wainwright offered a two-horse omnibus, with seats for 14 and an advertisement printed on the outside, for $550, with brakes $20 extra.

> A letter about the death of Daniel Webster on Oct. 24 written by a Yale College student, who said: "The autumn of the United States is at hand."

> A note from Mrs. E. E. Abbott, wife of a sailor, to her mother: "Philadelphia is . . . the most intemperate city in the Union. . . . Almost every man and boy drinks, or else you are a saint."

Postal inspectors took over the letters, hid the rest of their contents under the old rule of sanctity of the mail. Now would begin a probably futile search for the heirs who were rightful owners of the letters and their stamps, some of which might now be worth more than $1,000.

It was doubtful that postal records would still show where or how the robbery took place. Best clue (found in the Free Library of Philadelphia): a copy of the Philadelphia Public Ledger of Nov. 12, 1852, which recorded the arrest of one John W. Comegys in connection with mail robberies between Philadelphia and Baltimore.

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