Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/156

144 beverage. Those, no doubt, were the days when nothing mattered much, Nevertheless the fragrant coolness of that morning after touches my aching brow to this day with the soothing gentleness of a hand fraught with understanding and forgiveness.

Then what sea-lover is there but responds to the salt pungency of seaweed on an empty beach ?

It is an interesting fact that the smell of the sea may travel inland for miles on a favouring breeze. With the south-west wind blowing moist, I have in the heart of Lanarkshire repeatedly been stirred out of everyday hebetude by the smell of the sea on the Ayrshire coast, some thirty miles away. And Réné Bazin (in “Les Oberle”) says you can even smell it sometimes in Alsace, 250 miles from the Mediterranean.

Once, indeed, at King's Cross, London, I beheld monstrous railway-stations and muddy streets, with their motor-’buses, dingy wayfarers, yelling newsboys and all, melting away into the glimmer and space of the sea in a sort of magical transformation, just as mist low-lying in Russell Square will turn at times those gatish hotels into sea-girt palaces. … Only this time there was no mist. There was, indeed, no need of mist. For the spell of power was a sudden whiff of the sea from far across the bricks, slates, and sooty chimneys.