Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/159

Rh in a jumble of smells—dust, paste, ink and clammy overcoats. Such public mixtures the bookworm, that solitary self-centred individual, must, by reason of his shyness, ever consistently shun. But usher him into the private room of a private house where books, many books, have reposed for many years. Then go away and leave him to it.

The smell of a room full of books is slow to form. Like the bouquet of wine, it must ripen. You have to wait. But if you are able to wait, then one fine day you will be welcomed there by the snuggest smell in all the world, which, when once it comes, will for ever remain, like rooks in a clump of elms. I know a few houses where this most seductive of all perfumes has resided for untold years, and whence it will never depart as long as our immemorial England endures. But alas ! like most people, I have only been a fleeting visitor to those nooks of enchantment, and have had to wait myself not once, but many times, as often indeed as I have shifted my roof-tree, for that ancient fusty atmosphere. There is, I fear, no way of hastening the appearance of this beckoning finger to oblivion. We need not linger over the analysis of this particular odour. Book-lovers know it. Others don't care.

“You are a reader, I see,” said an observant doctor to me once. Rh