The Perfume of an Evening Primrose. 2 39 
perfume, but on those plains, where the grass was 
cropped close, the plant was small, only a few 
inches high, and the flowers no bigger than butter- 
cups. Afterwards I met with it again in the 
swampy woods and everglades along the Plata 
River; and there it grew tall and rank, five or six 
feet high in some cases, with large flowers that had 
only a faint perfume. Still later, going on longer 
expeditions, sometimes with cattle, I found it in 
extraordinary abundance on the level pampas south 
of the Salado River; there it was a tall slender 
plant, grass-like among the tall grasses, with wide 
open flowers about an inch in diameter, and not 
more than two or three on each plant. Finally, I 
remember that on first landing in Patagonia, on a 
desert part of the coast, the time being a little after 
daybreak, I became conscious of the familiar per- 
fume in the air, and, looking about me, discovered 
a plant growing on the barren sand not many yards 
from the sea; there it grew, low and bush-like in 
form, with stiff horizontal stems and a profusion of 
small symmetrical flowers. 
All this about the plant, and much more, with 
many scenes and events of the past, are suggested 
to my mind by the flower in my hand; but while 
these scenes and events are recalled with pleasure, 
it is a kind of mental pleasure that we frequently 
experience, and very slight in degree. But when I 
approach the flower to my face and inhale its per- 
fume, then a shock of keen pleasure is experienced, 
and a mental change so great that it is like a 
