Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/47

Rh when we recollect that it is scent that is directing them. Could vision be any more swift and sure ?

We may heartily wish, as a child once remarked to a friend of mine, that Rover had a prettier way of saying “How d’ye do ?” to his canine friends. But that and other even more objectionable habits do not prevent his entrée into the most exclusive circles of human society. He is taken at his own valuation, and that, to be sure, is considerable. But the minute, the meticulous, olfactory scrutiny he makes of other dogs is but one more example of the predominance of this sense in his brain. (See also later.)

When you take him for a walk also, how busy his nose makes him ! Burrowing here and there among the grass and undergrowth, picking up an interesting trail that leads him a little way, until it crosses another, fresher, perhaps, or more interesting, that has to be taken up—here a cat’s, there a rat's, further on a rabbit's, and then, with short squeals, scrapings in the ground, and buryings of his muzzle, a weasel's !—the whole intermixed and intermingled with whiffs of something like old decayed bones, or of another and an unfriendly dog, or of some ardent lady-love who has passed this way but shortly since I—is not this a richer, a fuller, a more attractive, world than ours, with its fickle sunlight, its pallid greys, its mournful Rh