The Jacobean herbalists and therapeutists in general, as we shall see later on, frequently credit aromatics with the power of strengthening the memory. But, so far as my reading goes, I have failed to find a clear and unmistakable description of this peculiar phenomenon in any writer prior to the nineteenth century. It is, of course, difficult to prove a negative, and so it would not be surprising if some such allusion were to be dug up. But even then the wonder would remain that it had attracted little, if any, attention from others. As a matter of fact, mental happenings of this order did not interest our forebears much. Shakespeare is the exception to this statement, and that is one of his claims to greatness. Moreover, quite apart from this particular, the writings of the old English poets and of such French and German authors as I am acquainted with, seem curiously deficient in references to all but the more gross and obvious phenomena of olfaction, and these are most frequently of the farcical order, a little too gross and obvious for modern readers. Since Dickens’s time, however, we have had almost too much literary odour. I do not agree with the purists who deny to Dickens the glory of a great writer of English prose. Dickens was an impressionist, perhaps the first and certainly the greatest of this school, and as such he was a master. Few equal and none surpass him in the rare vigour of scene, and portrait-painting. And it is significant to find him using the aroma of the place and also of the person to impart life and reality to his description. Take for example, to cite but one out of many olfactory references in his books, the humorous analysis of the smells in various London churches in “The Uncommercial Traveller.” One congregation furnishes “an agreeable odour of pomatum,” while in the others “rat and mildew and dead citizens” seemed to be the fundamentals, to which in some localities was added “in a dreamy way not at all displeasing” the staple character of the neighbourhood. “A dry whiff of wheat” circulated about Mark Lane, and he “accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock” in another. The reader’s throat begins at once to feel dry. Then note how Mr. E. W. B. Childers starts from the page the moment his creator breathes into our nostrils a breath of his life:—“a smell of lamp oil, straw, orange-peel, horses’ provender, and sawdust.” I could fill this book with olfactory citations from Dickens alone. But to come to contemporary writers, those of Rudyard Kipling are almost as plentiful, the smell that brings places to the mind being a favourite with him. But I have always wondered how it came about that the highly sensitive nose of Mr. Kipling permitted Imray’s corpse on the rafters above the ceiling-cloth to remain undiscovered for as long as three months. This in India. The bungalow, we gather, was haunted. It would be.