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, but it is photographic and external. Hearing deals in echoes,
but the sense of smell, while saving no vision of a place or a person,
will re-create in a way almost miraculous the inner _emotion_ of a
particular time or place. I know of nothing that will so "create an
appetite under the ribs of death."

Only a short time ago I passed an open doorway in the town. I was busy
with errands, my mind fully engaged, but suddenly I caught an odour from
somewhere within the building I was passing. I stopped! It was as if in
that moment I lost twenty years of my life: I was a boy again, living
and feeling a particular instant at the time of my father's death. Every
emotion of that occasion, not recalled in years, returned to me sharply
and clearly as though I experienced it for the first time. It was a
peculiar emotion: the first time I had ever felt the oppression of
space--can I describe it?--the utter bigness of the world and the
aloofness of myself, a little boy, within it--now that my father was
gone. It was not at that moment sorrow, nor remorse, nor love: it was an