The very days of the week have each its own particular olfactory mark, dating from our childhood: Sundays (in Scotland), peppermint followed by roast beef and richness; Mondays, pickles and soapsuds; Tuesday, the damp airs from the washing hung up to dry; Wednesdays, warmth and beeswax from the laundry, with ever and anon the thump of the flat iron; Thursdays, bread new from the baker and the washing of floors with soft soap—“Mind yer feet, now!”—Fridays, jam-boiling and the never-to-be-forgotten aroma of oat-cakes on the girdle; Saturdays—but Saturday is a day of wind and banging doors, of tops and dust; all its smells are out of doors. Shops, too! What of the coffee-shop?—Who does not pause a moment at that door when the beans are roasting? One of the richest of all odours that; curious how you lose it in the beverage! Then there is the ironmonger’s, where the sharp smell of steel strikes, by some strange reflex, the upper incisor teeth and gums; the oil and colour shop, with its putty, turpentine, and general clamminess; and, last and best of all, the druggist’s! What about the fried fish-shop? Faugh! I once for a reason connected with my calling had cause to spend a whole night in a room above a fish-shop—once only. The next time (there never will be a next time, she swears, but there always is)—the next time I happened, curiously enough, to arrive late! But although houses and rooms and, as we hinted, streets also, all smell differently, each town and city has its own peculiar fundamental odour. There is a town in Yorkshire that smells of “mungo.” I know another that smells of mineral oil, and many that exhale the dank smell of the coal-mine. London has a smell of its own, a fundamental familiar odour, which, by the way, has changed of late. Twenty years ago it was faintly acid with a background of horses and harness. To-day it is a mixture of tar and burned lubricating oil, by no means so pleasant. In addition to these, however, there is another and less prominent odour characteristic of the London atmosphere, which I confess I cannot describe. “Once upon a time, some forty years ago, there lived at Highgate, which then still retained some of the characters of a village, a lady who declared that when a yellow fog drifted up from London she could detect the smell of tobacco smoke in it. To most people the odour is flatly that of coal smoke, which is perhaps always more or less to be perceived in London air. This at any rate would seem to have been the opinion of Edward Jenner, if we may trust a note made by Farington in his diary for 1809, which is being printed in the _Morning Post_. Farington’s note is as follows: