OUR SENTIMENTAL GARDEN 



drical 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 her- 

 self. The delicate, diaphanous sky-blue smoke of the 

 beans, as they reached the perfecting point of their char- 

 ring, struck your eye as gratefully as the fragrance it con- 

 veyed 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 accom- 

 panies 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 a 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 c/osse 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. 

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