MEMORY, IMAGINATION, OLD SENTIMENTS AND ASSOCIATIONS, ARE MORE

READILY REACHED THROUGH THE SENSE OF SMELL THAN BY ALMOST ANY OTHER
CHANNEL.

Of course the particular odors which act upon each person's
susceptibilities differ. - O, yes! I will tell you some of mine.

The smell of PHOSPHORUS is one of them. During a year or two of
adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as

about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like
another, some of these things got mixed up with each other:

orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and
transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks; - EHEU!

"Soles occidere et redire possunt,"
but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of

eighteen hundred and - spare them! But, as I was saying,
phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its

luminous vapors with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance;
it comes to me in a double sense "trailing clouds of glory." Only

the confounded Vienna matches, OHNE PHOSPHOR-GERUCH, have worn my
sensibilities a little.

Then there is the MARIGOLD. When I was of smallest dimensions, and
wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we

would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop
opposite a low, brown, "gambrel-roofed" cottage. Out of it would

come one Sally, sister of its swarthytenant, swarthy herself,
shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would

gather a "posy," as she called it, 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 which 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 intimateconnection 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 wonted pugil. Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean lying
therein. I made the manual sign understood of all mankind that use

the precious dust, and presently my brain, too, responded to the
long unusedstimulus - O boys, - that were, - actual papas and

possible grandpapas, - some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,
- some in locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled, - do

you remember, as you doze over this, those after-dinners at the
Trois Freres when the Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the

dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our happy sensoria? Then
it was that the Chambertin or the Clos Vougeot came in, slumbering

in its straw cradle. And one among you, - do you remember how he
would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it

against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he was
hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the deep-

breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture,
in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]

Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through
my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I

was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and
pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were

stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period
there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate;

there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had
lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in

their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The
odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim

recesses.
- Do I remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"? -

To be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs
the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves

us. What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the
folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and

finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up
in them perhaps a hundred years ago? And, lo! as one looks on

these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in
the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and

the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine,
promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the

Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic
the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at

Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust
so long - even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry - are

alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils,
and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of

heaven! And all this for a bit of pie-crust!
- I will thank you for that pie, - said the provoking young fellow

whom I have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and
put his hands to his eyes as if moved. - I was thinking, - he said

indistinctly -
- How? What is't? - said our landlady.

- I was thinking - said he - who was king of England when this old
pie was baked, - and it made me feel bad to think how long he must

have been dead.
[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; CELA

VA SANS DIRE. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of
corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize

itself by a special narrative. There was the wooing and the
wedding, - the start in life, - the disappointments, - the children

she had buried, - the struggle against fate, - the dismantling of
life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts, - the

broken spirits, - the altered character of the one on whom she
leaned, - and at last the death that came and drew the black

curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.
I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but

I often cried, - not those pattering tears that run off the eaves
upon our neighbors' grounds, the STILLICIDIUM of self-conscious

sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits
until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those

tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features; - such I did