About: Great Possessions by David Grayson

GREAT POSSESSIONS

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sjaani and the Online DistributedProofreading Team

GREAT POSSESSIONS

By David Grayson

CHAPTER I

THE WELL FLAVOURED EARTH

"Sweet as Eden is the air And Eden sweet the ray.No Paradise is lost for themWho foot by branching root and stem,And lightly with the woodland share The change of night and day."

For these many years, since I have lived here in the country, I have hadit in my mind to write something about the odour and taste of thiswell flavoured earth. The fact is, both the sense of smell and the senseof taste; have been shabbily treated in the amiable rivalry of thesenses. Sight and hearing have been the swift and nimble brothers, andsight especially, the tricky Jacob of the family, is keen upon thebusiness of seizing the entire inheritance, while smell, like hairyEsau, comes late to the blessing, hungry from the hills, and willing totrade its inheritance for a mess of pottage.

I have always had a kind of errant love for the improvident andadventurous Esaus of the Earth. I think they smell a wilder fragrancethan I do, and taste sweeter things, and I have thought, therefore, ofbeginning a kind of fragrant autobiography, a chronicle of all the goododours and flavours that ever I have had in my life.

As I grow older, a curious feeling comes often to me in the spring, asit comes this spring more poignantly than ever before, a sense of thetemporariness of all things, the swiftness of life, the sadness of abeauty that vanishes so soon, and I long to lay hold upon it as itpasses by all the handles that I can. I would not only see it and hearit, but I would smell it and taste it and touch it, and all with a newkind of intensity and eagerness.

Harriet says I get more pleasure out of the smell of my supper than Iget out of the supper itself.

"I never need to ring for you," says she, "but only open the kitchendoor. In a few minutes I'll see you straighten up, lift your head, sniffa little, and come straight for the house."

"The odour of your suppers, Harriet," I said, "after a day in thefields, would lure a man out of purgatory."

My father before me had a singularly keen nose. I remember well when Iwas a boy and drove with him in the wild North Country, often throughmiles of unbroken forest, how he would sometimes break a long silence,lift his head with sudden awareness, and say to me:

"David, I smell open fields."

In a few minutes we were sure to come to a settler's cabin, a log barn,or a clearing. Among the free odours of the forest he had caught, afaroff, the common odours of the work of man.

When we were tramping or surveying in that country, I have seen him stopsuddenly, draw in a long breath, and remark:

"Marshes," or, "A stream yonder."

Part of this strange keenness of sense, often noted by those who knewthat sturdy old cavalryman, may have been based, as so many of ourtalents are, upon a defect. My father gave all the sweet sounds of theworld, the voices of his sons, the songs of his daughters, to help freethe Southern slaves. He was deaf.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60