UNCONSCIOUS SMELL 105 



emotion of any kind. His stolidity or indifference is, 

 however, in some degree a convention, a mask, which 

 he seldom neglects to wear in the presence of strangers, 

 especially in that of a white man, who possesses 

 strange and dangerous knowledge and looks down 

 on him. But I think he can smell a stranger as well 

 as see him, and is distinctly conscious of the strange 

 smell. That he consciously smells his own surround- 

 ings and people all the time is not to be supposed, 

 since the smells we live with cease to affect us. He 

 can smell his people when he has been absent from 

 them for a time. 



We can understand this — the conscious and the 

 unconscious smell — in our own every-day experience. 

 Thus, when I come into a room in the morning I 

 smell it, a distinctive smell different from that of 

 other rooms, according to the furniture in it, the 

 wallpaper, or paint, or whitewash, and the flooring, 

 wood, stone, or carpet. If it is a room I work in I 

 cease after a few minutes to smell it — I become 

 unconscious of its smell; but on my return to it I 

 find it again, the familiar welcoming smeU. 



Whenever, here in England, I come into contact 

 with gypsies and sit by their camp-fires conversing 

 with them, it always affects me like an old familiar 

 experience, because they are psychologically so much 

 on a level with the uncivilised Indian. The gypsy has 

 succeeded in fitting himself into a place in the midst 

 of a people of another and higher race because he 

 has a subtler mind than the western savage, and the 

 subtlety or cunning is either the result of long ages 



