and is only trouting and such small deer; and I never kill seven at a blow, or salmon by mistake, or anything of that sort; but the only salmon I ever bagged anywhere was the first I ever fished for, and I only cast for him once."

The man with the clay pipe held out his hand.

"I have looked for you all my life," he said solemnly; "I knew somebody must have done it, but no one has ever dared to say so before."

They shook hands.

"Where was it?" I asked, laughing.

"It was in Aberdeen.

I was staying with a friend, I am afraid to say how many years ago, on the Don. I was young, and he gave me lessons in casting-on the lawn, you know, without a fly. Then we went down to the river, got into a boat, put on a fly, and I made that cast. I told my companion I was fast in a rock, as the line would not come back. No, by Jove, it's a fish!' he said; and so it was. He showed me how to play it, landed me in due course, ran up to the house

for the gaff, came back and lifted out a clean fish of twenty and a half pounds. I have never caught one since."

"That easily might have happened,” I said, "but, somehow, it never

A sharp rattle of electric bells sounded through the smoking-room, and, with scarcely a word of explanation or apology to our stranger, we Members bolted like rabbits for the division-lobbies, leaving him to muse on the miraculous, and laugh at legislators, till our return.

IX.

Outrageous Fortune.

"A very antient and fish-like smell."

The Tempest.

THE power of memory residing in what scientists call the olfactory nerve is a constant surprise to everybody with a nose, and may be truly called transcendent. The faintest imaginable whiff of some odour, which has not greeted our nostrils for a number, any number, of years, transports us in a second of time to a vivid scene which would not otherwise have been reproducible upon the mental retina. Sights and sounds never remind us half so readily, or so completely, of bygone things and the years that are really lost to us: we have danced, for instance, many times to the now almost forgotten music of "The Cloisters," and, in conse

even

quence, its familiar cadences scarcely produce a blurred recollection of many mazy pictures; but though we have worn a gardenia as often, and sniffed its languorous odour far oftener, that perfume has preserved its power of faithfully recalling our first "Commem.," and never fails to conjure up a vision of that first brilliant ball.

Of evil smells it is not perhaps fitting, as Herodotus says, to speak; but tobacco may be mentioned without offence even in the presence of ladies, although there are still some who say they dislike smoke, as it always reminds them of a bar-parlour, a room which they have, of course, never seen. To dislike tobacco is like objecting generally to the taste of wine, for the aroma of a choice Havana is no more to be confounded with the exhalation of a clay than the flavour of Lafitte or Margot with the flavour of a tawny port. The slightest suspicion of one kind of cigar carries me, for some reason that defies analysis, to Lord's, as rapidly as if I had been placed on the magic carpet of the Arabian, and I see the glaring July sun shining down on the thousand glittering hues of that crowded

ring, where the heroes of old are still making history. I meet a cloud of a certain species of cigarette smoke at a street corner, and straightway am transported to the old College rooms, trying to believe, with other Freshmen, that manliness is synonymous with capacity for enormous breakfasts, and that dons and duns are subjects rather for ridicule than fear.

Did you happen to notice what those two foreign gentlemen were puffing at as they went into Simpson's just now for their daily encounter over the chess-board? There was nothing to see but an amorphous cloud of blue, but surely it wants no Sherlock Holmes to tell us that it came partly from a villainous black "Vevey," and partly from a lighter brown roll, grown and curled in the distant Fatherland. I do not know how it affects you, but for my part I look down the magician's telescope and see, as in a single picture, my first

foreign tour" of long, long ago, when that good-natured parson warned us, by the waters of the blue Thunersee, that though smaller than the mouse in thickness, the "Vevey" is more powerful than the lion and more noxious than