The inner sleuth

One spring, maybe a thousand years ago, a wallet that'd been stolen while I was on Christmas holiday, arrived in the mail. The postmark named a city in BC's interior I'd never been to, thousands of miles away from where the theft had occurred, and hundreds of miles from where I was then living. The wallet, mostly intact except for the missing $200, was accompanied by a note detailing the Good Samaritan's dog's retrieval from a rose bush. I knew who had stolen the wallet, though had no proof, but I had to see that person every day for the rest of the trip knowing he had gotten away with it. That someone had taken the time to package and send the found wallet to me, though, helped reaffirm my faith in the kindness of strangers.

And as I searched my wallet contents, wondering how it had finally gotten back to me, I considered how there's something sort of fun in the sleuth work, tracking down an individual based on the few clues available, as this article attests, about the kindhearted New Yorker who went to great lengths to return a lost camera.