Explore "Gilead Balm Knight Errant" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Nothing short of the direct interposition of Providence can be held to explain the premature chancing into Gilead's hands one morning of an ex-official copy of the _Daily Post_. The thing might have happened on any other morning in the year and signified nothing; it happened, _as_ it happened, on the one and only morning on which it could signify a great deal. He invariably read the _Times_ at breakfast, and the other paper, or Nestle's report on it, on his arrival at the office. Providence, desiring his independent notice of this particular issue, found occasion therefore to slip under his nose a copy of it, brought in, and forgotten, by some casual acquaintance who had sought him for a moment on a personal matter.
He might not have looked at it even then, had he not chanced -- chanced, mark you -- in rising to reach for the marmalade, to tread on an iron tack.