So it was this morning.  As I walked along the margin of my field I was conscious, at first, coming within the shadows of the wood, of the cool, heavy aroma which one associates with the night:  as of moist woods and earth mould.  The penetrating scent of the night remains long after the sights and sounds of it have disappeared.  In sunny spots I had the fragrance of the open cornfield, the aromatic breath of the brown earth, giving curiously the sense of fecundity—­a warm, generous odour of daylight and sunshine.  Down the field, toward the corner, cutting in sharply, as though a door opened (or a page turned to another lyric), came the cloying, sweet fragrance of wild crab-apple blossoms, almost tropical in their richness, and below that, as I came to my work, the thin acrid smell of the marsh, the place of the rushes and the flags and the frogs.

How few of us really use our senses!  I mean give ourselves fully at any time to the occupation of the senses.  We do not expect to understand a treatise on Economics without applying our minds to it, nor can we really smell or hear or see or feel without every faculty alert.  Through sheer indolence we miss half the joy of the world!

Often as I work I stop to see:  really see:  see everything, or to listen, and it is the wonder of wonders, how much there is in this old world 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 inexpressible cold terror—­that anywhere I might go in the world, I should still be alone!