Then there is the scent of thyme and roses in the farm garden. This brings to me old Sundays and ladies passing the open garden-gate on their way to church, with their Bible carefully wrapped up in a clean pocket-handkerchief, bearing with them also what somebody in Scotland calls “the odour of sanctity”—peppermints, to wit—and all the time the bees are humming in the warm air a deep note to the trills and runs of the skylark lost in the blue. But I could wander on for an eternity with these smell memories and pictures. One more, and I have done with the farm, and that is the cool smell of the milk-house. It is dark there after the blaze outside, and the stone flags strike cold to a boy’s bare feet wandering in from the burning cobbles of the courtyard. As your eyes become accustomed to the dimness you can see on the floor the wide, shallow milk coolers, silvery as full moons in that twilight, the only light that enters coming through the long slit of a narrow unglazed window where blistery leaves of green docken, springing rank from the unkempt garden without, show a splash of sunlight. The smell is sourish and cold, if we may speak, as I think we may, of the temperature of a smell. This is forbidden land to boys for obvious reasons, but so strong is the impression that I have never forgotten my one and only visit to that secluded chamber. What is it that gives to a dungeon its characteristic smell? Emphatic as a blow. Obviously, we have here a combination of several sense impressions, tactile, visual, olfactory: tactile, for the air is damp and chilly; visual, for it is a blank, a negative, and yet a powerful influence; olfactory, smelling ominous and of death. Old dried bones emit precisely the same exhalation. In a subtle way, too, the presence of mould is perceptible, all blending into the horrible and grisly atmosphere of despair; the Valse Triste and the Dance of Death. Smell can bring as certainly and as irresistibly as music emotions of all sorts to the mind. In this same category we may place the dusty smell of a dry hay-loft, which is curiously like that of bitter almonds and hydrocyanic acid. It has a sensation like ghostly fingers fumbling about your neck with a threat, half playful, half serious, of suffocation. And, curiously enough, the mental feeling of throttling fingers is not amiss. Prussic acid kills by paralysing the respiratory centres. Let us get out into fresh air again! The sun is shining. A gentle breeze from the west is snowing the lawn with fragrant hawthorn blossoms. I catch a whiff of delicate lilac, and see coming towards me over the grass a slender figure in white.... And so we close with the perfumes of the spring, sunshine, and beauty. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS