rds she was trying some waltzes of Chopin's, and came upon one
with which she was quite familiar. She knew that she had heard it all,
over and over again, but could not think when or where. Presently,
however, as she played it, she perceived a smell of black-beetles, and
instantly she was back in that disused kitchen of Miss Deeble's,
listening to the practising overhead.

All Beth's senses were acute, and from the first her memory helped
itself by the involuntary association of incongruous ideas. Many
people's recollections are stimulated by the sense of smell, but it is
a rarer thing for the sense of taste to be associated with the past in
the same way, as it was in Beth's case. There were many circumstances
which were recalled by the taste of the food she had been eating at
the time they occurred. The children often dined in the garden in
those early days, and once a piece of apple-dumpling Beth was eating
slid off her plate on to the gravelled walk. Some one picked it up,
and put it on her plate again, all covered with stones and grit, and
the sight of hot apple-dumpling made her think of gravel ever
afterwards, and filled her with disgust; so that she could not eat it.
She had a great aversion to bread and butter too for a long time, but
that she got over. It would have been too great an inconvenience to
have a child dislike its staple food, and in all probability she was
forced to conquer her aversion, and afterwards she grew to like bread
and butter; but still, if by any chance the circumstances which caused
her dislike to it recurred to her when she was eating a piece, she was
obliged to stop. The incident which set up the association happened
one evening when her father and mother were out. Beth was alone in the
dining-room eating bread and butter, and Towie, the cat, came into the
room with a mouse in her mouth. The mouse was alive, and Towie let it
run a little way, and then pounced down upon it, then gave it a pat to
make it run again. Beth, lying on her stomach on the floor, watching
these proceedings, naturally also became a cat with a mouse. At last
Towie began to eat her mouse, beginning with its head, which it
crushed. Beth, eating her bread and butter in imitation, saw the white
brains, but felt no disgust at the moment. The next time she had bread
and butter, however, she thought of the mouse's brains and felt sick;
and always afterwards the same association of ideas was liable to
recur to her with th