Who has not seen women turning sidelong glances, with that surreptitious intentness we all know so well, towards some very ordinary man in whose voice they, but not we, detect the indefinable something that has the power of luring these shy creatures from their inaccessible retreats? What man has not seen this play and puzzled over it? The quality—is it perhaps something caressing, or something brutal and ultra-masculine, or both at once? Who knows what it is that their intuition perceives? So we ask, we less favoured mortals, as we turn and look at him also, hard and long, only to give it up with a shrug! When I am one of a crowd under the spell of an orator—a rare bird, by the way, in England—I feel his power less in what he says than in how he says it. Gladstone, for example, swayed his audience by the fervour of his personality, not by any beauty of word or thought in his rhetoric. How meaningless his speeches seem to us nowadays as we vainly try to read them, how involved, discursive, ambiguous, turgid. How dull! And yet we know that these same involved, discursive, ambiguous, turgid and dull speeches could and did rouse hard-bitten Scotsmen to a wildness of enthusiasm that seems to us incredible. Thus the personality is something that travels on the wings of sound. But is that all? Is there not something more, something imperceptible which yet exercises a secret power over our emotions and passions? Is there an olfactory aura? “Why does the elevation of the Host in a Roman Catholic church bring such an assurance of peace to the congregation?” writes a friend of mine. “This remarkable sensation I have myself frequently experienced and wondered at. Yet I am, as you know, a Scots Presbyterian, and do not credit for a single moment the miraculous change of bread and wine. And yet to this gracious and comforting influence I have been subject on more than one occasion. It is for all the world as if the constant pin-pricks of our normal life were suspended for a moment or two. “It is present only during service, and then only at the culmination of the rite. “As I do not believe in the miracle, the influence must come to me from without, not from within myself. Indeed, I have actually come to the conclusion that it is borne in upon me not by the church atmosphere with its incense, nor by the solemn intonation of the priest, nor by the whisper of the muted organ, nor yet by the distant murmur of the choir, but—by the congregation itself! “It is from the kneeling worshippers that the mysterious influence emanates, invisibly, inaudibly, intangibly, to suffuse with the peace of some other world the spirit even of an unbeliever....” Is it possible that influences such as these may enter by the olfactory door?