Explore "Gilead Balm Knight Errant" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The typical Agony Column of the _Daily Post_ was built up in courses which varied in little but their diurnal degree of thickness. Starting from a plinth, say, of Dancing and Gymnastics, it would rise by successive stages, through Cast-off Clothes, Skin-beautifiers and Superfluous-hair Removers, Patent-medicines and Special-cure Treatments, Detective Agencies, Paying-Guest and Social Introduction offers, to Personal Appeals, whence soaring through Club-fixtures and Lost Property advertisements, it would flower at length into a capital of the true ‘agonizings,' crowned sometimes, at irregular intervals, by an apocalyptic warning to the worldly and thoughtless to set their houses in order.
Gilead, from mere force of habit, was wont to run his eye down these successive courses from top to base -- though his proper business lay with the Personal Appeal section alone -- which was the reason why the following brief supplication momentarily arrested his attention on a certain November day: --