Thence also comes a memory of heliotrope. It grew by a cottage just beyond a grey granite fishing-harbour in Dublin Bay, and brings also, with its faint, ineffable fragrance, the same inseparable blending of emotions that clings, itself a never-dying odour, to the memory of holidays in Ireland. There is a phrase in a song, simple, sentimental, even silly if you like, that prays for “the peace of mind dearer than all.” “But what,” I remember asking the mother of our party—“what is meant by ‘peace of mind’?” Her wistful smile seemed to me to be a very inadequate reply to my question—which, by the way, I am still asking. It is an historical fact that the movement which rendered England the pioneer country in the matter of Public Health received its first impulse from, and even now owes its continued existence to, the simple accident that the English public has grown intolerant of over-obtrusive odours. Stenches have attained to the dignity of a legal topic of interest, and are now by Act of Parliament become “nuisances” in law as well as in nature, with the result that they have been, for the most part, banished from the face of the land and the noses of its inhabitants. The reason assigned by the man in the street for this reform was, and indeed still is, that stenches breed epidemic diseases. In a noisome smell people imagine a deadly pestilence, probably because patients affected with such epidemic diseases as smallpox, typhus, and diphtheria, give off nauseating odours. Now, bad smells from drains and cesspools do not of themselves induce epidemic disease. Nevertheless, there is this much of truth in the superstition, that where you have bad smells you have also surface accumulations of filth, and these, soaking through soil and subsoil, contaminate surface wells, until it only requires the advent of a typhoid or other “carrier” to set a widespread epidemic a-going. Further, as recent investigators have shown us, the loathsome and deadly typhus fever, known for years to be a “filth-disease,” is carried by lice, which pests breed and flourish where bodily cleanliness is neglected and personal odours are strong. So that in this, as in most superstitions, there is a substratum of truth. But the point is, that the objection to bad smells preceded all those scientific discoveries and had, in the beginning, but a slender support from rationalism. Our forebears builded better than they knew. Their objection was in reality intuitive. It may be true that all nations occupying a corresponding level of civilisation will manifest the same instinctive abhorrences, but it has been left to the practical genius of the English race to give effect to the natural repugnance and to translate its urgings into practice.