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 intimate connection 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 unused stimulus—­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?]