SCENTS AND MEMORIES

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 97, 19 January 1926, Page 2

SCENTS AND MEMORIES

I think the most poignant memories brought back to one’s mind are those revived by scents (a writer in the “Evening Standard” says). I do not mean attar of roses, white lilac, and all those other expensive scents, distilled from anything but the flowers after which they are named, but the scent of cut grass, of coffee roasting, or even the dusty, musty smell of ancient books and buildings.

To many people the smell of newlymown grass is pleasant. To me it brings back my schooldays. I see the large, old-fashioned schoolroom window overlooking a smooth, daisied lawn. To this hour, with the whiff of fresh-cut grass comes the sight of a tall, bent old gardener pushing the mowing-machine vigorously over the turf. He is full of business, regardless of the regiments of daisy heads Iving decapitated on the grass. Chrvsantliemums, those flowers of autumn with their bitter-sweet fragrance. To me—perhaps to most people—these blossoms of the dying year bring memories tinged with sadness. Not a dull, heavy sadness, but a sadness one feels as one realises that the end of another year is coming, that another vear of our lives, has gone. That the' store-house of memory has been added to. T hat the sad things and the glad things alike have receded into the'Land of the Past, and will onlv be seen, realised, and perhaps idealised, through the mists of autumn —chrysanthemum-time