Here the purchase of scent is not a commercial transaction but a ceremony. The customer is seated upon a divan, piled high with cushions, and the turbaned merchant takes his place behind a table, on which are laid out fantastically shaped vials and vessels, like a sorcerer about to begin his mystic rites. The perfumes sold here, remember, are not the ordinary scents of commerce with which we Westerns are familiar, but concentrated quintessences, the merest drop of which upon a handkerchief or glove or sleeve confers a fragrance which will last for days. A silent-footed attendant serves tiny cups of coffee, thick, sweet, and black as molasses, and scented cigarettes. A charcoal brazier is smoldering in the corner, and from it rises a faint suspicion of incense. Daintily opening with delicate, tapering fingers the glass-stoppered bottles ranged before him, the perfume wizard runs through the whole gamut of odors; he plays upon the sensitive olfactory nerves as a great musician plays upon an organ. For, of all the senses, that of smell is most closely associated with remembrance. It can recreate a vanished vision on the human motion-picture screen we call the mind. It can arouse the emotions—pain, pleasure, passion, longing, sadness—and fan into flame the embers of the past. It can bring back, as at the wave of a magician’s wand, the thoughts and scenes of far away and long ago. Perhaps I myself am more susceptible than most to the effect of perfumes ... I do not know. But the scent of roses brings back with overwhelming vividness the loveliness of a Capri rose-garden where I wandered with Her in the fragrance and the moonlight, long, oh, long ago. The redolence of cedar, and I see in my mind’s eye a carpenter’s shop which I passed daily when I lived in Syria, with the white-turbaned, patriarchal carpenter working at his bench amid a litter of shavings, and camels, laden with logs from the Cedars of Lebanon, kneeling patiently at the door. Sandalwood conjures up a vision of Indian temples, with shafts of sunlight striking through the murky interiors to be reflected by brazen buddhas, inscrutable of face; of twilight on the Ganges at Benares; of the pink palaces and towers of Jaipur. Geranium, heliotrope, lemon verbena—these show me once again the stately, white-pillared house in which I was born, with my grandmother bending lovingly over the flowers in her old-fashioned garden, the stretches of close-cropped greensward, the leaves of the old, old elms whispering ever so gently in the summer breeze.