t, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue
slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last
few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling
onions,--stateliest of vegetables,--all are gone, but the breath of a
marigold brings them all back to me.

Perhaps the herb _everlasting_, the fragrant _immortelle_ of our autumn
fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me
dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that
come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. A
something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from
the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of
a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint
sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not
tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought
to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.

----I should not have talked so much about these personal
susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them that I
believe is a new one. It is this. There may be a physical reason for
the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind. The
olfactory nerve--so my friend, the Professor, tells me--is the only
one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in
which, as we have every reason to believe, the intellectual processes
are performed. To speak more truly, the olfactory "nerve" is not a nerve
at all, he says, but a part of the brain, in intimate connection with
its anterior lobes. Whether this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom
of the facts I have mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious
enough to be worth remembering. Contrast the sense of taste, as a source
of suggestive impressions, with that of smell. Now the Professor assures
me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate connection
with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of the spinal
cord.

[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to this
hypothesis of mine. But while I was speaking about the sense of smell
he nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in getting out a
large red bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a little to the other
side, and after much tribulation at last extricated an ample round
snuff-box. I looked as he opened it and felt for the