train, loiters gracefully to the station and waits to be caught.




THE SMELL OF SMELLS


I Smelt it this morning--I wonder if you know the smell I mean?

It had rained hard during the night, and trees and bushes twinkled in
the sharp early sunshine like ballroom chandeliers. As soon as I stepped
out of doors I caught that faint but unmistakable musk in the air; that
dim, warm sweetness. It was the smell of summer, so wholly different
from the crisp tang of spring.

It is a drowsy, magical waft of warmth and fragrance. It comes only when
the leaves and vegetation have grown to a certain fullness and juice,
and when the sun bends in his orbit near enough to draw out all the
subtle vapors of field and woodland. It is a smell that rarely if ever
can be discerned in the city. It needs the wider air of the unhampered
earth for its circulation and play.

I don't know just why, but I associate that peculiar aroma of summer
with woodpiles and barnyards. Perhaps because in the area of a farmyard
the sunlight is caught and focused and glows with its fullest heat and
radiance. And it is in the grasp of the relentless sun that growing
things yield up their innermost vitality and emanate their fragrant
essence. I have seen fields of tobacco under a hot sun that smelt as
blithe as a room thick with blue Havana smoke. I remember a pile of