Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/25

Rh still, I regret to say, a few that abide with us, seemingly as nasty as ever they were.

One deplorable instance you will encounter at the Paddington terminus of the Great Western Railway no less, at a certain platform of which station, lying in wait for our fresh country cousins on their arrival in London, there lurks a livid concoction of ancient milk, horse-manure, live stock, dead stock, and, in the month of July, fermenting strawberries, as aggressive and unashamed as the worst Lucerne has to offer. I commend it to the attention of the Medical Officer of Health for Paddington.

Nay more! This West London efflorescence does not lie blooming alone. It is by no means the last rose of summer. On the east side of the great city, another, a rival upas-tree, spreads its nauseating blight, This is a mess that, oozing from a soap factory near Stratford-atte-Bow, envelops in its oleaginous cloud several hundred yards of the main line of the Great Eastern Railway. And the world we live in is so arranged that the trains, particularly in summer, are held up by signal for several minutes in this neighbourhood, so that, as the greasy slabs of decomposing fats slump in at the open carriage windows, an early opportunity is afforded to our Continental visitors of becoming acquainted with the purifying properties of English soap.