Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/168

156 them also what somebody in Scotland calls “the odour of sanctity” —peppermints, to wit—and all the time the bees are humming in the warm air a deep note to the trills and runs of the skylark lost in the blue.

But I could wander on for an eternity with these smell memories and pictures, One more, and I have done with the farm, and that is the cool smell of the milk-house. It is dark there after the blaze outside, and the stone flags strike cold to a boy’s bare feet wandering in from the burning cobbles of the courtyard. As your eyes become accustomed to the dimness you can see on the floor the wide, shallow milk coolers, silvery as full moons in that twilight, the only light that enters coming through the long slit of a narrow unglazed window where blistery leaves of green docken, springing rank from the unkempt garden without, show a splash of sunlight. The smell is sourish and cold, if we may speak, as I think we may, of the temperature of a smell. This is forbidden land to boys for obvious reasons, but so strong is the impression that I have never forgotten my one and only visit to that secluded chamber.

What is it that gives to a dungeon its characteristic smell ? Emphatic as a blow. Obviously, we have here a combination of several sense impressions, tactile, visual, olfactory : tactile, for