A glowing log rolls down from its allotted place on the hearth, sending into the room a jet of wood smoke, blue at the stem, white feathering as it spreads out; and the pungent smell immediately revives a fresh set of scenes from the past.

That nothing brings back old memories so suddenly and so vividly as perfume is a commonplace remark. But I wonder whether the extraordinary persistency of a first impression, in the case of odours constantly met with, has been so generally noticed. Perhaps I am peculiar in this sensitiveness. Smells, pleasant, indifferent, or otherwise, which one is liable to encounter in the most varied circumstances, should, one would think, cease in time to recall any particular period of existence.

For example, the delicious smell of roasting coffee—an aroma not common in England—may well bring you back, at a jump, to some foreign, unfamiliar experience of your youth—to that early morning walk in the little Flemish town of which you have forgotten the name; where, as you sauntered down the street, you were greeted at nearly every doorstep by this pungent savour. The black cylindrical family roaster, its berries rattling musically within, was being carefully revolved over its bed of live charcoal by the boy of the house, or perhaps by the housewife herself. The delicate, diaphanous sky-blue smoke of the beans, as they reached the perfecting point of their charring, struck your eye as gratefully as the fragrance it conveyed to your nostrils. No wonder that, after a long spell, even a distant whiff of that odour of promise should bring back a definite picture. But that essences of such everyday character, say, as petrol; or that which accompanies the peeling of an orange, should still have the power of bringing me back, instantly, to the hours of my early schooling, is in truth a curious matter.

In the case of petrol, perhaps, the connexion is less extraordinary. Until the age of the motor was ushered in—and that is barely a score of years ago—the smell of “petroleum,” as it was still called, could come upon the sense as an odour out of the usual run.

Whenever I come across it now, it never fails to waft me back to the old class-room of the Institution, the Etude No. 3, where I first made acquaintance with the possibly wholesome but not otherwise attractive redolence of the lampes À petrole. That was during the short days of the year, when these luminaries were brought in soon after four o’clock, and suspended over our young heads—a ceremony coinciding with the last hour of classe—at the end of which the assembly would be dispersed for the day: the bigger boys walking back to their neighbouring homes, the smaller being fetched by their bonnes, or it might be the footman; or yet, in unpropitious weather, by anxious parents in carriage or fiacre.

Quaint place, that Institution—when one looks back on it from this far end of the road! I think I can breathe its peculiar atmosphere this instant—and see the queer, long, low room, with the beams across the ceiling; the whitewashed walls, covered with highly coloured elementary maps and graphic pictures of the metrical system applied to measures lineal and cubical, solid and liquid, and to the national coinage.... There they are: the six rows of benches and desks, each with its half-dozen youngsters, some elaborately drawing a steel nib, in strokes alternately swelling and slender, over a copybook of bafflingly soft paper, productive of periodical splutters; others reading in earnest or in pretence a chapter of Epitome; others, again, committing, with dumb mouthing, a fable of La Fontaine to memory for to-morrow’s recitation, until such moment as the cracked voice of the courtyard clock striking five should proclaim the hour of release. The usher, ensconced in cathedra, at his high desk; a smaller lamp for his especial benefit burning and smelling by his side; a book before him.—In his own walk he must have passed, methinks now, for something of a dandy, in the cheap line; for he remains associated more with sedulous trimming of nails, with pulling out of curly brown whiskers; with a nervous, tricky settling of collar, tie and cuffs obviously false, than with anything else.... He yawns amain. He consults his watch, and closes it with a click in the midst of the great silence of the room—the silence made more sensible, rather than disturbed, by the recurrent splutter of a pen-nib, or the turning of a leaf of Epitome.

That Epitome Historiae Sacrae was a primer adapted to first year boys—a small buckram-bound book compendized, poetically expurgated, and made in truth singularly attractive to the young imagination—more attractive even, I fancy, than those Fables of La Fontaine and of Florian that, read in the light of “short stories,” were such favourites. It was, by the way, called Epitome Sacrae or even Sacrae pure and simple, in the same manner as the volumes allotted to the two subsequent years were known respectively as Latinae and Graecae.

I would give a fairly large coin of our present money for a copy now, could I come across one in some old bookstall on the quays. But, from their very nature, the cheapest books are among the rarest things to recover at second hand.

It was within the pale green covers of that queer little tome that I tasted for the first time the literary savour of the various genres in tale-telling; of pastoral and romance, of idyll and tragedy. One could not truly say that any very strong impression of a sacred character was conveyed through the collection of Holy Scripture stories. But it is doubtful whether anything read in after-life was stamped so clearly on the imagination as the poetry of Ruth amid the ears of barley, of Rebecca and the pitcher of water, of Rachel; as the romance of Joseph and his brethren; as the tragedy of Samson and Delilah; as the war pictures of Jericho and Jerusalem. It may have been a jumble of disconnected tales—and, for the boys, nothing more than tales—but each remains cut out in clean outline and brightest colours that are never likely to fade. To this day a field of golden corn, newly reaped, in pastoral Dorset, under a hot harvest sun, will raise the bright phantom of Boaz and the gentle gleaner. A country lass at the fountain, or even merely the rim of some disused and filled-up well, aye even such cryptic names as Jakin and Boaz, the pillars, will conjure up again some picture first raised from the pages of that Epitome Sacrae, read under the light of the brown lamp gently swaying in the draught of the school-room above our ruffled heads ... and steadily smelling of petrol!