Of all times of the day for good odours I think the early morning the very best, although the evening just after sunset, if the air falls still and cool, is often as good. Certain qualities or states of the atmosphere seem to favour the distillation¹ of good odours and I have known times even at midday when the earth was very wonderful to smell. There is a curious, fainting fragrance² that comes only with sunshine and still heat. Not long ago I was cutting away a thicket³ of wild spiraea which was crowding in upon the cultivated land. It was a hot day and the leaves wilted⁴ quickly, giving off such a penetrating⁵, fainting fragrance that I let the branches lie where they fell the afternoon through and came often back to smell of them, for it was a fine thing thus to discover an odour wholly new to me.

 

I like also the first wild, sweet smell of new-cut meadow grass, not the familiar odour of new-mown hay, which comes a little later, and is worthy⁶ of its good report, but the brief, despairing odour of grass just cut down, its juices freshly exposed to the sun. One, as it richly in the fields at the mowing⁷. I like also the midday smell of peach leaves and peach-tree bark at the summer priming: and have never let any one else cut out the old canes⁸ from the blackberry rows in my garden for the goodness of the scents⁹ which wait upon that work.

 

Another odour I have found animating¹⁰ is the odour of burning wastage in new clearings or in old fields, especially in the evening when the smoke drifts low along the land and takes to itself by some strange chemical process the tang of earthy things. It is a true saying that nothing will so bring back the emotion of a past time as a remembered odour. I have had from a whiff of fragrance caught in a city street such a vivid return of an old time and an old, sad scene that I have stopped, trembling there, with an emotion long spent and I thought forgotten.

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