When the postman leaves the mail at your door, he is just one of over 350,000 people 当邮递员将邮件放在你家门口时，他只是35万多名邮递员当中的一位，

who are busy every day seeing that the mail is delivered throughout our country. 他们每天忙碌着为全国民众寄邮件。

The post office in your town is one of the 50,000 post offices in the United States. 你城镇上的邮政局也是美国5万个邮政局中的一个。

Over fifteen billion stamps are used every year. Let us see how this great business of message-carrying 每年使用的邮票超150亿张，看看如此庞大的邮政业是如何

has grown since the days when our country was young. In the early days of our country, 发展的，自从刚刚建国开始，在美国初期，

the colonists lived in little settlements along the Atlantic coast all the way from Massachusetts to Carolina. 殖民者居住在大西洋沿岸的小块殖民地上，从马赛诸塞到加州。

They were separated from each other by dense forests and wide rivers. England, the land from which they had come, 他们被茂密的森林和宽阔的河流所隔绝，他们来自英格兰，

was far away across the Atlantic Ocean. There were no telephones or telegraphs or ocean cables or trains or highways, 英格兰距离大西洋很遥远，当时没有电话，电报，海地电缆，铁路或是高速，

and of course there were no radios or airplanes. Today, if we wish to send a message, 当然也没有无线电或飞机，今天如果我们希望传递信息，

we can have it delivered anywhere in the United States within a few hours. 我们可以在几个小时送达到美国各处。

If any important event happens, we may know of it within a few minutes. 如果发生了重大事件，我们可以在几分钟内知道。

We have sent messages to Byrd at the South Pole, 我们曾在南极向博德发送信息，

and we have received messages from him over thousands of miles of ice and snow, mountains and seas. 信息穿越了数千英里的冰雪，山峰和海洋，我们接收到了他的信息。

It is hard for us to realize how different things were in the early days. 我们很难想象这在早前是多么的不一样。

When George Washington died at Mount Vernon, the news did not reach Boston for ten days. 当乔治·华盛顿在弗农山庄逝世时，消息十天还没有到达波士顿。

When a new president was elected, people did not hear of it for over a month. 当新任总统当选时，人们一个多月也不知道这个消息。

If you lived then and your father or mother or brother or sister went on a journey, 如果你生活在那时，你的父亲或母亲，或兄弟姐妹出门旅行，

you could not hear from the traveler for many a day. 你或许好几天收不到旅行者的信息。