how the odours arrange themselves in
upright strata, so that one walking passes through them as from room to
room in a marvellous temple of fragrance, (I should have said, I think,
if I had not been on my way to dig a ditch, that it was like turning the
leaves of some delicate volume of lyrics!)

So it was this morning. As I walked along the margin of my field I was
conscious, at first, coming within the shadows of the wood, of the cool,
heavy aroma which one associates with the night: as of moist woods and
earth mould. The penetrating scent of the night remains long after the
sights and sounds of it have disappeared. In sunny spots I had the
fragrance of the open cornfield, the aromatic breath of the brown earth,
giving curiously the sense of fecundity--a warm, generous odour of
daylight and sunshine. Down the field, toward the corner, cutting in
sharply, as though a door opened (or a page turned to another lyric),
came the cloying, sweet fragrance of wild crab-apple blossoms, almost
tropical in their richness, and below that, as I came to my work, the
thin acrid smell of the marsh, the place of the rushes and the flags and
the frogs.

How few of us really use our senses! I mean give ourselves fully at any
time to the occupation of the senses. We do not expect to understand a
treatise on Economics without applying our minds to it, nor can we
really smell or hear or see or feel without every faculty alert. Through
sheer indolence we miss half the joy of the world!

Often as I work I stop to see: really see: see everything, or to listen,
and it is the wonder of wonders, how much there is in this old world
which we never dreamed of, how many beautiful, curious, interesting
sights and sounds there are which ordinarily make no impression upon our
clogged, overfed and preoccupied minds. I have also had the feeling--it
may be unscientific but it is comforting--that any man might see like an
Indian or smell like a hound if he gave to the senses the brains which
the Indian and the hound apply to them. And I'm pretty sure about the
Indian! It is marvellous what a man can do when he puts his entire mind
upon one faculty and bears down hard.

So I walked this morning, not hearing nor seeing, but smelling. Without
desiring to stir up strife among the peaceful senses, there is this
further marvel of the sense of smell. No other possesses such an
after-call. Sight preserves pictures: the complete view of the aspect of
objects, bu