Stamps

Part I

A lot of boys and girls in our country and in England, too, like to collect stamps. Two English boys, Peter and Bert, also collect stamps. Peter has already more than a thousand stamps. He began to collect them five years ago, but Bert is only beginning and has not more than three or four hundred stamps.

Bert did not know how to collect stamps. Peter showed him how to put stamps in water and take them off paper. He also showed him how to put all the stamps from one country on the same page of his stamp book.

Many countries have very beautiful stamps and children can learn much from them about the different countries of the world. Stamps are like little pictures. Very often they show the flowers or the trees which grow in this or that country, or the animals that live there. They may show the different kinds of transport in the country: ships, boats, planes, buses and cars.

Stamps may also have portraits of famous people on them: scientists, engineers, pilots, writers and painters.

There are stamps that show different kinds of sports and portraits of famous sportsmen. Stamps may also show pictures from the history of the country which makes them.

Part II

The first stamp in the world was an English stamp. It was made in 1840. Before that time people paid money to the postman for every letter that they got, and the postman did not give letters to anybody who did not pay him.

An English teacher, whose name was Rowland Hill, thought much about this. One day he said that the people who wrote the letters must pay for them, and not the people who got the letters. He spoke about it to people in the government. Soon the post-offices began to sell little pieces of paper with 1 penny stamped on them. These stamps, as the people called them, they put on letters. The people who got letters with stamps on them did not have to pay anything to the postman.