delight in sights and sounds and smells.

I am tempted to go a little further with this subject, as in taxing my memory for some adequate expression concerning the sweet-brier, I can only recall these lines from Shakspere and Chaucer-these two who are never coupled. They are not the two greatest in our poetic literature, but to me they are the greatest, and one I worship and the other I love. Alike in their all-embracing view of humanity and power of characterization, they are yet as wide apart as East from West in spirit. One would say offhand that the contrary of this is the truth, that they are alike in spirit, since only in virtue of great sympathy and love for their fellows, with the insight that comes of genius, could they have produced all that crowd of wonderfully true portraits that adorn their galleries. Nevertheless, to me they differ essentially in feeling. It was sympathy and love with insight in one, and pure intellect with simulated sympathy in the other.

There 's Hamlet sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and there's gross Falstaff, with his rapscallion followers and his old friend Justice Shallow; and there 's Malvolio and Richard II, and passionate Romeo, and the melancholy Jaques, and old crazed King Lear, and many, many more. They are an immense crowd, for they have now come down out of their frames or books; they are of flesh and blood, and I am walking among them as among old friends and acquaintances. But where is Shakspere all the time? I find him not despite all the loud, triumphant shouts of those who have discovered him in this or that character and exposed his true inwardness

to the world. He hides from, he deludes, he mocks us, until we come to regard him as a mythical being or a demigod.

Chaucer revealed himself in every one of his creations, in every line he wrote. If he had a fault as an artist, it is that he is too human; the sense of kinship, of brotherhood, is, however, more to me than artistry, even of the godlike aloofness of Shakspere. Can we in all our literature find one like him in this, a blood-relation to all men, good or bad, from the lowest human refuse to the highest, the kingly and saintly; he is one of them always, and eats and drinks and laughs and weeps and prays with them. All the others whose works are a joy forever are now dead-dead and gone, alas! We know it when we read them. Even great Shakspere and his fellow-Elizabethans, with all those who came after, the heroic, the fantastic, the metaphysical, with their tantalizing, fascinating conceits; and succeeding them, the smooth, the elegant, the classical, who reigned a hundred years; then the revolting romantics in a more than century-long procession down even to the spasmodics, whose Balders, Festuses, and Aurora Leighs our one immortal critic would have described as a relapse into a romantic savagery more offensive to common sense than the fantastic conventions of the seventeenth century; and finally the Victorian giants who long survived these offensive ones: great Browning, cheerful in his white tie and shirt-front; Tennyson, now under a cloud, sad and prophetic, like the druids of old, with the beard that rests on his bosom; and last to follow to the grave, Swinburne, in orange waistcoat and loincloth tattooed all over with beautiful female faces in

rainbow colors, still valorously piping on his shrill, everlasting pipe. Dead dead are they all! But if you think of Chaucer as dead you are greatly mistaken, and when you read him, you need not reflect mournfully, as you would in the case of another, that he no longer treads this green earth; that he who was most alive and loved life more than all men, is now lying in the coldë grave, alone, withouten any companie.

I know it, because I am so often with him, walking in many a crowded thoroughfare, watching the faces of the passers-by with an enduring interest in their individual lives and character. But I appreciate his company and love him best amid all rural scenes, especially in early spring, when we together delight our souls with the sight of the glad, light green of the open oak-leaves and the cold, fresh, wholesome smells of earth and grass and herbage. He alone at such times is capable of expressing what I feel. Reading Wordsworth and Ruskin, nature appears to me as a picture: it has no sound, no smell, no feel. In Chaucer you have it all in its highest expression; he alone is capable of saying, in some open woodland space, with the fresh smell of earth in his nostrils, that this is more to him than meat or drink or any other thing, and that since the beginning there was never anything so pleasant known to earthly man.

8 4

All this about Chaucer in this inquiry will seem somewhat irrelevant to some readers. I do not think so; and even now, after all said, I am still reluctant to let go his hand. From the oakwood I go with him to the open fields in search of early daisies, and

with him kneel on the grass and bend down to kiss the beloved flower-the beautiful dead child Margaret, come to life and light again in a changed form. Or seated on a green bank, my hand on his shoulder, converse with him; and if he falls to talking bawdy or love of it, until he makes me sick, I am a little ashamed of this modern squeamishness, and am able to rejoice in his ranker zest in life, his robust humor.

And all this time I am seeking after something hidden. Does he, Chaucer, speak only for himself when he writes thus of daisies and the smale foules with their melodie and the scents of earth and leaves and flowers, or is he expressing feelings which were more common in his day than in ours?

Here, then, for the present, at all events, I will drop the question.

It is rather unpleasant, after reveling in paradisaical odors with my ancient friend, who is more alive despite his half a thousand years than any man I know, to have to conclude this part of my subject with a somewhat disturbing matter.

When I first came to England I soon discovered that all scents on the male person, natural or artificial, were distasteful and even abhorrent to men. I had been kindly taken in hand by new-found friends who desired to make an Englishman of me-a respectable person. They told me to wear a silk hat and frock-coat, tan gloves, and to carry a neatly folded umbrella in my hand. They also instructed me to take in "The Times." One of my friends, a nice old retired barrister, assured me that a man who had not read his "Times" in the morning was unfit to walk the streets of London. I obeyed them in everything; but when

they objected to a little cologne or lavender on my pocket-handkerchief, I revolted. They said I had come from a semibarbarous country and did not know all that this meant that an English gentleman with scent about him aroused a strong feeling of hostility in others, and that it was considered very low and indicated a person of an effeminate and nasty mind. But as I had lived among semibarbarous people and hobnobbed with savages and dangerous whites, I knew I was not effeminate and that the nastiness was not in my mind. Their feeling about scents was an associate one. As boys they all herded in great schools and universities, and when the time came for the restraints to be relaxed, they went out to "see life," and seeing life with them did not mean mounting a horse and riding forth in quest of adventures; it simply meant going up to London or any other big town in their neighborhood, where they placed themselves under the guidance of those who knew the ropes and who took them to the haunts of people they had never encountered before people who were not respectable, chiefly women who received them with ravishing smiles and open arms. These women have the habit of scenting themselves somewhat excessively, and the scents and the women and their haunts, and the people and life altogether, became associated in their young impressionable minds. Byand-by the revulsion comes. Respectability and the serious business of life call them back, and they shake themselves free; but, alas! not free of the vile associations that all perfumes have for them for the remainder of their lives.

It may be that this feeling, a sense of disgust, in the gentlemen of this

island country is of modern growth. At all events, we read in books that in the eighteenth century, down even to the early nineteenth, when the gentlemen visitors made their exit from a drawing-room, backing gracefully out and bowing low in the elegant manner of those times, they invariably left the scent of pomander behind them.

Two centuries earlier takes us to a time when an time when an Englishman could saturate himself with perfumes as readily as any Venetian lady of that period; when a gentleman could call on his apothecary to get him an ounce of civet, a large order in those days, just to sweeten his imagination.

§ 5

From associations which degrade something which is lovely in itself we will go on at once in conclusion of this paper to those which exalt, and the use of perfumes in religious symbolism. Let me first, however, refer to the word "spiritual" as used a few pages back in describing the perfume of certain flowers. That it has been used by others in this connection I do not know: it would surprise me to learn that it had not. Nevertheless, I must say something in elucidation of my private meaning.

Spiritual, as here used, refers to a scent, or to a quality of a scent, which differs in character from all these flower odors described as sweet, delicious, luscious, rich, lovely, luxuriant, etc.-the scents, in fact, which in some degree are suggestive of flavors; differing too, from all fragrant gums and woods, spices and the aromatic smells of leaves; also from all artificial perfumes and scents distilled from flowers. You may capture and bottle a rare or spiritual perfume, but its

chief virtue, its highest quality, will vanish in the process. That can be had only from the living flower.

Spiritual, then, in the flower scent means an effect on the mind, one we are already familiar with. We find it in certain human faces, in their expression; in human voices, too, in some moods, in speech or song; in certain flowers in their appearance, never, perhaps, in any brilliantly colored flower; in certain bird sounds,-it may be in a certain note or phrase of its music, also in other non-human things, even in the inorganic world, as in certain aspects of earth and sea and sky in certain rare atmospheric conditions.

Finally, it is a more ethereal scent than those of other flowers; therefore more evanescent, yet more penetrating, touching the mind, as we imagine, to something more than a mere esthetic satisfaction.

We know how great a part association has in the pleasure we receive from lovely things-sights, sounds, and scents; it may indeed be the chief cause of the effect produced by those rare and delicate scents we have been considering, though I don't think so. Anyhow, it is doubtful. Thus I may at any time find that peculiar effect in a wild flower never previously met with, growing in some desert place.

With frankincense it is a different story. It is one of the thick or heavy perfumes of the fragrant gums which do not suggest flavors, but are also far removed in character from the etherealized quintessential flower scents described as spiritual. The effect, The effect, therefore, in religious ritual is mainly due to association, and it is a very powerful effect, and no doubt it was

much more potent in the ages of faith than now, and that it was this use of frankincense which gave rise to that common belief in lovely and heavenly perfumes emanating from the longburied bones and corpses of dead saints on their exhumation. Intellectually, we know, smell does not rank as highly as the other two senses, but it is, on the other hand, more emotional and stirs the mind more deeply than seeing and hearing. It has, as it were, a higher and lower nature, and only in the lower does it come near to taste, and taste even in the Protestant, full of dry light as he is, he yet admits into his religious symbolism. But he cannot attend a Roman Catholic church or cathedral service in the reverent spirit of one who looks on all churches as God's house without feeling its effect, and recognizing its peculiar fitness despite the want of association for him in that cloud of incense; and he may even think that he has been wrongfully deprived of something desirable and of value in his own church service when he remembers his Bible, which is perhaps his fetish, and the words of the Being he worships, when he proclaimed through the mouth of his prophets that from the rising of the sun to its going down incense would ascend to him, morning and evening, in all places.

Why, then, is incense not used in the Anglican Church, which took its ritual from the church before it? Nobody knows. The histories only tell us that it began to fall into disuse in the reign of Edward VI.

There I will leave the subject, which, I confess, is rather an out-of-the-way one to bring into a series of papers concerning the senses of man and animals by a field naturalist.

OHNNIE DEAUTREMONT sat on the

step in front of Bondi Ruml's shack, his big hands between his knees, his head bent forward, his little eyes vacant with the stare that is turned inward. He had sat there so long that the veins in his hands were swollen. It was beginning to grow cold, too, for April in northern Minnesota has a bitter dampness, and the fog settles down evenings as in September.

He hunched the collar of his mackinaw closer about his neck, but he did not move. There was something terrible in the man's stolidity, something ominous in the control he possessed over his great body. It seemed that It seemed that he scarcely breathed, and the focus of his tiny eyes never altered. Even in repose his physical power carried a challenge. He was forty-one, and his muscles had lost their first suppleness, perhaps, but they had gained in endurance. His face had the hard, dissipated look that often belongs to men who have undergone great physical hardships.

Johnnie Deautremont was the boss logger of northern Minnesota. Winters he was foreman for the North Star Lumber Company, and all the men in the outfitting village of Belle Fleur worked for him. Every year, after the first snow, he left the miserable huddle of shacks built around the saloon and the company store to lead his crew up into the long white silence

of the forest. Belle Fleur was not much of a town to regret, squatted down at the edge of the timber, with its rotted corduroy-road, its sidewalks torn into shreds by the spiked boots of the loggers, and the floors of its shacks ground into sawdust.

But in Belle Fleur, at least, one escaped from the forest, from the cold that brings a long agony in bleeding chilblains, from the sound, day and night, of the wind in the branches, from the buried light under the pines, where it seems as though one were imprisoned beneath a sea of jade.

In the summer Johnnie Deautremont was a cruiser. Then, all alone, he went up into the forest, his pack on his back, to blaze the tract that would be logged the next winter. In the parlance of the North he had a nose for timber. Johnnie Deautremont knew trees as a stone merchant knows jewels. He could estimate with uncanny accuracy into how many feet of lumber a tract would fell and cut.

In his own world nobody disputed Johnnie Deautremont and nobody liked him. Even last spring, when he had risked his life in a vain attempt to save Bondi Ruml, no man's heart had skipped a beat in admiration. It had happened up on the Lumber River, a tricky stream with a vicious current down which the tree-trunks were floated to the mill at Black Fork.