THE DUTCH MAIL

Dunstan Times, Issue 987, 18 March 1881, Page 3

THE DUTCH MAIL

The following paragraph “is going the rounds,” ami no doubt amusing many people in the course of its progress:—■ 1 In his youth Sir Richard Phillips edited and published a paper at Leicester called the Herald. One day an article appeared in it headed * Dutch Mail,' and added to it was an announcement that it had arrived too late f->r translation, and so had been set up and printed in the original This wondrous article drove half England crazy, and for years the best Dutch scholars squabbled and pored over it without being able to arrive at any i lea of what it meant. The famous ‘ Dutch .Mail ’ was m reality merely a column of ‘pi-.’ ‘ Pie,’ it may be as w. 11 to explain, is a jumble of odd letters gathered up, and set on end so as to save their fac s from being scraped, to be dis-, tributed at the leisure oi the printers iu their proper places tsonuoletters are upside down, often ten or twelve Coi'isflnants or J as many vowels come toge'iher, and the who.t/is pep, ered with • punctuations,' dashes, ffndso on, till it might pass for poetry by a lunatic Ch Ctaw. The stiuy Sir Richard 'tells of the particular 1 pie ’ he had a whole hand iu is this:— ‘One evening, before one of otir public tions, my men and a boy oveiturned two or three columns of the paper in type. We had to get ready m some way for the ouches, which, at four in the morning, required four or fi\e hundred papers.. After every exertion wo were short nearly a column ; but there stood on the galleys a tempting column- Of pie. It suddenly struck me that this might be thought Dutch. I made up {the column, overcame the. scruples of the foreman, and so away the 'country edition -went, with its phiiolgieal puzzle, to wony.the honest agricnl- . tnral reader's head -Tiiere w.is plenty of time to set up a column of paiia r.nglish for the local edition.’ fcju - .it.chard teds of one man, whom ho .met.in Nottingham, who tor d 4 ,-yeura ~..1're.-e_"ve(l ,a c> py ol the Leicester Her.ld, lipping th• f aome, day the letter would 'oe ex i laiued."