Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/59

Rh and praised than—I conldn’t help it !—I forgot everything —everything. And all I could say was :

“‘James! You've been eating onions again !’

“‘Not my fault, I assure you, my dear,’ he snapped back ; ‘that dammed cook always will put garlic in the nectar ! You must get rid of her.’

“… I suppose I must have fainted then, for I remember no more till I found myself lying on the floor with my head on the fender. I picked myself up very puzzled as to what had happened. Then I remembered my … dream, with a shock rather of amusement than fear, when suddenly—suddenly I smelled the nauseating stench of strong garlic ! That finished me entirely. How 1 got out of the place I cannot tell. Out I did get. And I have never gone back.”

This lady evidently would not have subscribed to the old teaching of Salerno :

Six things that heere in order shall issue Against all poisons have a secret poure. Peares, Garlick, reddish-roots, Nuts, Rape and Rew, But Garlick cheese, for they that it devoure May walk in ways infected every houre ; Sith Garlick then hath poure to save from death Bear with it though it make unsavoury breath : And scorne not Garlick, like to some that think It only makes men wink, and drinke, and stink.”

(It may be remembered, by the way, that Wilkie Collins’s “Haunted Hotel” was haunted by a smell.)

Although we may agree with Shelley that

“Odours when sweet violets sicken Live within the sense they quicken,”

yet we must admit that the memory of an odour cannot be reproduced in our mind with