espairing odour of grass just
cut down, its juices freshly exposed to the sun. One, as it richly in
the fields at the mowing. I like also the midday smell of peach leaves
and peach-tree bark at the summer priming: and have never let any one
else cut out the old canes from the blackberry rows in my garden for the
goodness of the scents which wait upon that work.

Another odour I have found animating is the odour of burning wastage in
new clearings or in old fields, especially in the evening when the smoke
drifts low along the land and takes to itself by some strange chemical
process the tang of earthy things. It is a true saying that nothing will
so bring back the emotion of a past time as a remembered odour. I have
had from a whiff of fragrance caught in a city street such a vivid
return of an old time and an old, sad scene that I have stopped,
trembling there, with an emotion long spent and I thought forgotten.

Once in a foreign city, passing a latticed gateway that closed in a
narrow court, I caught the odour of wild sweet balsam. I do not know now
where it came from, or what could have caused it--but it stopped me
short where I stood, and the solid brick walls of that city rolled aside
like painted curtains, and the iron streets dissolved before my eyes,
and with the curious dizziness of nostalgia, I was myself upon the hill
of my youth--with the gleaming river in the valley, and a hawk sailing
majestically in the high blue of the sky, and all about and everywhere
the balsams--and the balsams--full of the sweet, wild odours of the
north, and of dreaming boyhood.

And there while my body, the shell of me, loitered in that strange city,
I was myself four thousand miles and a quarter of a century away,
reliving, with a conscious passion that boyhood never knew, a moment
caught up, like a torch, out of the smouldering wreckage of the past.

Do not tell me that such things die! They all remain with us-all the
sights, and sounds, and thoughts of by-gone times awaiting only the
whiff from some latticed gateway, some closed-in court to spring again
into exuberant life. If only we are ready for the great moment!

As for the odour of the burning wastage of the fields at evening I
scarcely know if I dare say it. I find it produces in the blood of me a
kind of primitive emotion, as though it stirred memories older than my
present life. Some drowsy cells of the brain awaken to a familiar
stimulus--the odour of the lodge-fire