than I do, and taste sweeter things, and I have thought, therefore, of
beginning a kind of fragrant autobiography, a chronicle of all the good
odours and flavours that ever I have had in my life.

As I grow older, a curious feeling comes often to me in the spring, as
it comes this spring more poignantly than ever before, a sense of the
temporariness of all things, the swiftness of life, the sadness of a
beauty that vanishes so soon, and I long to lay hold upon it as it
passes by all the handles that I can. I would not only see it and hear
it, but I would smell it and taste it and touch it, and all with a new
kind of intensity and eagerness.

Harriet says I get more pleasure out of the smell of my supper than I
get out of the supper itself.

"I never need to ring for you," says she, "but only open the kitchen
door. In a few minutes I'll see you straighten up, lift your head, sniff
a little, and come straight for the house."

"The odour of your suppers, Harriet," I said, "after a day in the
fields, would lure a man out of purgatory."

My father before me had a singularly keen nose. I remember well when I
was a boy and drove with him in the wild North Country, often through
miles of unbroken forest, how he would sometimes break a long silence,
lift his head with sudden awareness, and say to me:

"David, I smell open fields."

In a few minutes we were sure to come to a settler's cabin, a log barn,