Now, the people of Lucerne could never have smelled them, or at all events they could never have appreciated those perfumes as I did, or the town would have been evacuated. Their olfactory sense compared with mine must have been a stupid thing, dense to begin with, and cudgelled by use and wont into blank insensibility. Because, it is obvious, delicacy in this, as in all the senses, can only be acquired by avoiding habitual overstimulation. And that avoidance is only possible in a country where odours are fine, etherealised, rare. Even in France, France the enlightened, the sensitive, the refined, primitive odours pervade the country, as our Army knows very well. Not only is the farm dunghill given place of honour in the farm courtyard, close to doors and windows, but even in the mansions of the wealthy the cesspool still remains—not outside, but inside, the house, the water-carriage system, even the pail-system (if that can be called a system), being unknown. So that our Army authorities had to send round a peculiar petrol-engine, known to the Tommies as “Stinking Willie,” to empty those pools of corruption. Some of the monasteries used by us as hospitals were, at the beginning of the war, even worse. From this we may surmise that the olfactory sense of our neighbours is not yet so sensitive as is ours. But in this matter Western Europe, at its worst—say, in one of the corridor-trains to Marseilles—is a mountain-top to a pigstye compared with the old and gorgeous East. “The East,” ejaculated an old Scotsman once—“the East is just a smell! It begins at Port Said and disna stop till ye come to San Francisco, ... if there!” he added after a pause. From his sweeping condemnation we must, however, exempt Japan. Who can ever forget the bazaar smells of India, the mingled must and fust with its background of garlic and strange vices, or the still more mysterious atmospheres of China with their deep suggestion of musk? Naturally the air of a cold country is clearer of obnoxious vapours than that of tropical and subtropical climes, but in spite of that, the first whiff of a Tibetan monastery, like that of an Eskimo hut, grips the throat, they say, like the air over a brewing vat. So that, after making every allowance for the favour of Nature, we are still entitled to claim that the relative purity of England, and of English cities, towns and even villages, is an artificial achievement. I may therefore, with justice, raise a song of praise to our fathers who have had our country thus swept and garnished, swept of noxious vapours and emanations, and garnished with the perfume of pure and fresh air, to the delight and invigoration of our souls. And yet the change has only recently been brought about. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the city of London