Flossie Irish spent a long night Thursday, pacing the floors in her small Burnham farmhouse. She had spent the morning engrossed in the arduous task of paying bills and setting money aside for a bank deposit to cover the checks she was writing.

But that evening as she went to deposit $610, $400 of it in cash, in the night deposit box at her bank, she realized that the plain white envelope in which she had put the cash was gone.

“That’s a lot of money to me, and I’m looking all over the passenger side of the car and I’m thinking, ‘OK just what did I do here?'” Irish recalled Friday afternoon.

It didn’t take long for the 65-year-old woman to realize that she had mailed the unmarked, unaddressed and unstamped envelope of cash.

“There was nothing I could do at that time of night. It was 7:30 or 8. I couldn’t do nothing, so I just paced the floors,” Irish said.

All that was written on the outside of the envelope was “checking deposit” and the account number, she said.

Before the hour was really decent Friday, Irish was on the phone with someone at the Burnham post office, who promised to call the Hampden processing plant to get employees there looking for the valuable envelope.

Meanwhile, Irish received a call from a somewhat smug daughter, April McAllister, who lives in nearby Clinton.

“Did you lose something?” the daughter asked her mother.

A nighttime employee at the Hampden plant had come across the envelope, opened it up, saw the cash and one check that was inside.

The check had been written by Irish’s daughter and included an address and a phone number.

Before 8 a.m. Friday, the envelope of cash had been delivered to Irish’s daughter in Clinton.

“Do you know that all they would have had to do was throw away the check and keep that cash?” a still stunned Irish said Friday. “I am just so thankful that we have honest people working in the post office. I didn’t even know about that Hampden place.”

So on Friday, with her cash safely deposited in her bank account, Irish spent part of the day trying to get hold of someone in the post office to give some credit to the honest Hampden bunch.

“I called some 800 number and, well, I had to keep pushing those buttons, but I eventually got somebody and told ’em I wanted Hampden to get some credit for honesty. It took me a long while, but I think I finally got through.”