The smell of a room full of books is slow to form. Like the bouquet of wine, it must ripen. You have to wait. But if you are able to wait, then one fine day you will be welcomed there by the snuggest smell in all the world, which, when once it comes, will for ever remain, like rooks in a clump of elms. I know a few houses where this most seductive of all perfumes has resided for untold years, and whence it will never depart as long as our immemorial England endures. But alas! like most people, I have only been a fleeting visitor to those nooks of enchantment, and have had to wait myself not once, but many times, as often indeed as I have shifted my roof-tree, for that ancient fusty atmosphere. There is, I fear, no way of hastening the appearance of this beckoning finger to oblivion. We need not linger over the analysis of this particular odour. Book-lovers know it. Others don’t care. “You are a reader, I see,” said an observant doctor to me once. “How d’you know that?” I asked in surprise, as we had just met for the first time. “I know it,” was his reply, “by the caressing way you took up that book!” Your real bookworm loves all books. Like the modern genius, he is amoral. But unlike the genius, his amorality, simple soul, is confined within the four walls of a library. He could never, I am sure, bring himself to agree with André Theuriet, who in “La Chanoinesse” depicts “les _Bijoux indiscrets_ auprès des œuvres de Duclos; _Candide_, _Jacques la Fataliste_ et _le Sophia_ voisinant de _Restif de la Brétonne_ à deux pas de _l’Emile_, et _les Aventures du Chevalier de Faublas_—une nouveauté—non loin de _l’Histoire philosophique des Indes_,” all of which books, by a kind of moral exercise of his imagination we cannot sufficiently deplore, he found exhaling “une odeur de volupté perverse, quelque chose comme le parfum aphrodisiac des seringes et des tubereuses dans une chambre close.” Every dwelling-house has its own peculiar atmosphere, sometimes agreeable, sometimes not. But, whatever its quality, so characteristic and persistent are some of them that I am sure a blind man would always be able to tell them by the smell alone. Few of us may be gifted with the analytical nose of a Charles Dickens to detect the ingredients that make up a complex domiciliary atmosphere, but everybody must have noticed that basement houses smell differently from bungalows, the former greeting you with a harmonious blend of earthiness, soapsuds, and sinks. Nay! The house you live in has a separate odour for each room: the drawing-room with its chintzes; the snuggery with its stale tobacco, and, perhaps, like an insinuating nudge, with a whiff of the stronger alcohols; the bedrooms, if your housekeeper knows her business, with the freshness of well-aired linen.