munication with government troops something that he vigorously denied. The investigations follow each other rapidly. Some are held in our room and others in an office on the first floor. About three o'clock I am called, and taken down to the office. The city commander had inquired by telephone if I was there. They said I was, and that ended the matter for the time being. I take the inquiry as a sign that my released fellow prisoner had begun to do something for me, and that someone at headquarters had got interested. In addition, I had requested the black-haired educated man, who was in charge of the investigation, to notify my wife, and he had assured me a little later that he had done so. Above, in the detention room, the sentries distribute books from the school library to the prisoners. 'Would the gentlemen like something to read?' I take a volume of Herodotus and read how the Medes, after a period of anarchy, restored their king. My reading was interrupted by the entrance of a man who asked for Professor Berger. This man was formerly an assistant salesman in a delicatessen shop, and had even served Mr. Berger and his wife there. He now has a business in Müller Street and had chanced to see the arrest of Mr. Berger. He informed his wife, and now brings the old gentleman eggs, bread, and warm soup in a thermos bottle. Mr. Berger sends word to his wife that he had had a good meal that noon; that he is in good company; and that he will keep the food until evening, and that she need not worry about him. When the kindly messenger had left, the black-haired man and the civilians from the office presented themselves again and took the names of nine of the prisoners on a sheet of paper. These nine were to be heard first. Among them were Mr. Berger, the police official, and the Prince of Thurn and Taxis. The fate of the young automobile driver from Regensberg and the aviator appeared to have been settled already. They were taken below. The police official speedily returned, sat down on a bed in the corner and began to weep. 'Ah! it is so horrible I can't describe it! If you could just see into my soul.' That is all that he could reply to the questions of his sympathetic fellow prisoners. A Red Guard sought to comfort him. 'Nothing will happen to you; you can be at rest.' Are the others lost, or only some of them? Only the nine, or everyone? As a matter of fact, the police official was soon after released. But that was merely the signal for the worst of all. The school-bell began to sound an alarm. One heard the sound of voices and commands in the courtyard of the school; then one volley after another. They had placed the prisoners, innocent or guilty, up against the wall, one after another, and shot them down as reprisals for twenty Red Guards who were alleged to have been shot at Grümwald by the government troops а rumor that was later proved to be false. This horrible massacre kept up until five o'clock. While the volleys kept crashing in the court below and the man with the nervous shock had one crisis after another on his bed, a new prisoner in the room kept declaiming unceasingly, 'I am a Communist, gentlemen; I am a Bolshevik. I am in favor of the Soviet Republic. I am only opposed to having certain individuals utilize the opportunity to benefit themselves.' He kept repeating these sentences with the same identical words over and over, until the fat Berlin fellow vigorously protested, saying, 'Be quiet a moment! They are shooting people down below.' Suddenly it was perfectly still in the room. The orator sat down on a bed, and suddenly fell asleep half-sitting, half-lying back. The others still in the chamber above were preparing for speedy death themselves. The black-haired man comes in once more. Apparently he is profoundly agitated. He tells us that we will not have any more investigations that day. 'Is it true that Levien is now down there?' asks the Berliner. The black-haired man says, 'Yes.' 'Then it's all right,' turning to the communist with the patent-leather shoes then nothing will happen to us.' Levien, who had these others murdered or knew of the murders and did not prevent them, is accordingly the last hope of these gentlemen. It is six o'clock in the evening. The old gentleman with spectacles and an umbrella silently enters the room and sits in a chair without taking off his overcoat, supporting his hands on his umbrella. The sentries bring in our supper. It is bread, with a huge piece of Liptau cheese and tea. We are told that if we wanted to have food brought from home, they would willingly take a message for us. We can also write them to visit us, since we are permitted to have visitors now. It was proposed The Münchener Neueste Nachrichten to lighten our last hours. Those who have relatives in Munich write letters. Meanwhile the Berlin chap walks about the room eating his bread, and as he passes, takes one egg after another of the supper left behind by Professor Berger. Now and then he murmurs to himself, 'So Levien is now there. Then it's all right.' Two members of the Red Guard come in and carry away the man with the nervous shock. He is to be taken to a hospital. His wife, who has been with him the whole afternoon, sighs with relief and accompanies him. Now the black-haired man comes to the door and speaks my name and a few words which I do not understand. I rise for my last journey, and reach my hand in adieu to a fellow prisoner. He says that I did not understand what was said; that I am to be liberated. Shaking his hand, with a wish that we may soon meet again in liberty, I take my leave of my fellow sufferers. One gives me a message to his family, and I am released, to be greeted at the entrance of the building by my wife, who, supported by several loyal friends and favored by a number of remarkably happy circumstances, has secured my liberation. VOL, 15-NO, 751 THE SMELL OF FLOWERS BY EDMUND CANDLER It was a pleasant fancy of the ancients that the smell was the soul of a flower. Our sense of beauty in a plant, Ruskin believed, arises from our unconscious sympathy with its happiness. If this is so, or if fragrance is the language, if not the spirit, of the plant, then wallflowers, roses, lilacs, violets, meadowsweet, rosemary, and mignonette are the happiest, and, therefore, the most beautiful, of English flowers. But to the genuine lover of herbs every individual smell, however sharp or eccentric, is grateful, since it is the expression of the mood or character of the plant. The wholesome appetite delights in acrid, pungent exhalations only in a less degree than in dainty and subtle scents. There is nothing gross or offensive in the smell of any English flower, not even in the houndstongue which reeks of mice and 'cureth the rancke and rammish odour of the body,' or in the greater celandine whose orange-yellow juice, especially when the flower has lost its freshness, has an ancient fishlike savor, or in the hot, dusty, pungentsmelling black horehound of the lanes. To anyone genuinely curious in God's handiwork, and, therefore, tolerant and understanding with regard to it, these plants are as agreeable in their place as rosemary or stock. As a general rule the more subtle the smell of a flower the greater its attraction, and the more mysterious the suggestion of individuality in the plant. There is an order of sweet smells, and you will find them in nearly every class, which, Bacon tells us, 'have joined with them some earthy or crude odours, and at some distance the sweet which is the more Spirituall, is Perceived, and the earthy reacheth not so farre.' It is, perhaps, to this conflict of appeals that flowers like the rosemary, meadowsweet, fleabane, marjoram, and thyme owe the secret of their peculiar attraction. In the part of his Natural History which deals with flowers, Bacon discusses 'smells and other odours,' and with much grace and seriousness adopts the metaphor in which the scent is spoken of as the spirit of the flower. 'Sweet smells,' he says, 'are more forcible in Dry substances, when they are Broken, for there is a greater emission of the Spirit when Way is made.' Then with, a touch of contradiction, 'Flowers Pressed or Beaten do loose the Freshnesse and Sweetnesse of their Odour. The Cause is, for that when they are Crushed, the grosser and more Earthy Spirit cometh out with the Finer and troubleth it.' Many and ingenious are the generalizations that he adduces to explain the origin and degree of smells: why, for instance, the blossoms of trees that are white, as cherries, pears, plums, are commonly inodorate,' whereas those of apples, crabs, almonds, peaches, which are 'blushy,' smell sweet; and why it is that 'Rew doth prosper much and becommeth stronger if it be set by a Figge-Tree.' The cause of the scentlessness of white-flowering fruit trees is that 'the Substance that maketh the Flower, is for the same ends, that Lychnis vespertina is white in order to be distinguished by moths at night, and that it opens its perfumery a few minutes after half-past six in the evening to attract the particular class of insect that is useful to it in the process of fertilization? of the thinnest and finest of the Plant; which also maketh Flowers to be of so dainty colours. And if it bee too sparing and Thinne, it attaineth no strength of Odour; except it be in such Plants as are very succulent.' As to the rue's debt to the 'Figge-Tree' Bacon conceives that it is not by Reason of Friendship, but by etraction of a contrarie Juyce: the one drawing Juyce fit to result Sweet, the other bitter. So the ancients have setence to the visits of insects; and as down likewise that a Rose set by a Garlick is sweeter; Whereas likewise may be, because the more Fetide Juyce of the Earth goeth into the Garlick; And the more odorate into the Rose.' Farmers will smile at Bacon's analogy of the cornflower. Arguing on the same principle of the 'etraction of contrarie juyces,' he implies that crops gain by the presence of certain weeds, more especially of the cornflowers, which come seldom or never in other places, unlesse they be set, but only amongst corne.' The deductions of these old naturalists are as ingenious as the reasoning of the subliminal consciousness in dreams, which with little or no data for guidance reconciles inconsistencies, and discovers the most plausible syllogisms out of the nonsensical material it is given to work upon and believes in them, until the supraliminal consciousness emerges and takes over charge. If Bacon and Darwin had been of the same generation and in possession of the same data the Natural History of Bacon might have been the subliminal output of Darwin. Yet to an intelligent mind, to whom the book of Nature had been opened for the first time, Darwin would seem the bigger dreamer. What would the sage of Elizabeth's time have thought if he had been told that women and flowers unconsciously employ the same arts In the daytime the white campion emits no scent. The odor and smell of flowers have been developed in refer this species is fertilized by moths, fragrance is as unnecessary to it in the sunlight as bright colors. Darwin discovered that it is an invariable rule that when a flower is fertilized by the wind it never has a gayly-colored corolla. From a superficial view there is something almost sordid in this economy; it detracts from one's sense of the happy carelessness of Nature to learn that flowers which do not need the help of insects have no color to speak of and little scent, like dowdy women who have discovered that there is no point in being attractive. Poets and sensitive youths may regret this first introduction to the laws of commerce and traffic in Nature; yet, if it is a shock to find that lilies toil and spin after all, that fragrance, or color, or both, are necessary to a plant that is incapable of fertilizing itself, and that bees and flowers are exacting in their system of exchange, all this is in keeping with the pathetic fallacy of the poet, who sees in universal Nature a kind of chorus in sympathy with his own happiness or distress. The meaning and purpose behind beauty only add to its mystery, and to the sense of our kinship with earth. We think we have discovered why Lychnis vespertina is white, and Lychnis diurna red, why the foxglove has a bag, and a thousand other adaptations of plants to the visits of insects; but the waylaying seductiveness of flowers does not in the least explain the dainty and exquisite raiment of the insects that visit them, the bars of the Red Admiral, or the purpose of those eyes that peep at one so intelligently from the back of the folded wing of the Meadow Brown. After all, there is nothing in these negotiations between plants and insects to destroy Wordsworth's picture in which 'every flower enjoys the air it breathes.' Sweet-scented flowers give the live⚫ liest impression of enjoyment; a gamut of happiness ranging from a modest gratitude in the wallflower to ecstasy in the rose. The wallflower has a certain quality of happiness which is all its own, a ripe and virginal content springing out of the sympathy and sweetness of its nature; and its gentleness is enhanced by the modest beauty of its apparel. Whenever one thinks of spring, one remembers the lovely brown dappled velvety flower that throws its warm fragrance across the garden path. It is the favorite of cottagers and royal personages. Maeterlinck describes it as 'dressed like the servant of the village priest.' But his rhapsody on the wallflower is a little too precious and literary for a response to so frank and ingenious an appeal. One almost prefers the spontaneity of Pyecraft: "Ow 'eavenly that lilac did smell on top of that first down, stinkin' its blossomin' little heart out.' The Cruciferæ are not generally favored with sweet scents, though in masses, as in a mustard field, they attain a rich fragrance. The wallflower, stock, and Hesperis are exceptions to the general scentlessness of the order, and they make good, in the same rich measure as the pink and one or two of the Lychnis family, in the case of Caryophyllaceæ, which are otherwise not very communica tive, or lavish of themselves, in respect to fragrance or color. The Caryophyllaceæ, or pink family, when they smell at all, generally have a subtle scent as the cuckoo-flower which has given Tennyson a simile: Your melancholy sweet and frail As perfume of the cuckoo-flower. of the strong sweet and modest order The violet, rose, and mignonette are of smells. The wild rose and sweetbriar are redolent of midsummer. They overhang the deep lanes and mingle their fragrance with the hay, and late in the evening scatter their perfume over the meadows, where in peace The lazy cows wrench many a scent flower Robbing the golden market of the bees. The wild rose is the cleanest-smelling flower in the world; it exhales the soul of the dew; and its very diseases, as in the robin's pincushion, are beautiful. It was the mignonette which almost. seduced from piety Anatole France's Curé of the Bocage, who feared beauty even in flowers. He banished all blossoms from his presbytery garden save these modest ones, and had 'so little distrust of his mignonette, that he would often in passing pick a spray and inhale its fragrance for a long time.' The man of God had succeeded in guarding his eyes, but had left his nostrils undefended, and so the devil, as it were, 'caught him by the nose.' The wild mignonette has no scent, and the garden one apparently had not been introduced in Gerard's time. He only mentions two species of reseda; one of them, Reseda pliny, the Italian rocket, he describes as ‘of a naughty savour or smell.' One cannot imagine a love scene by a river, in which meadowsweet does not enter in. We smell it in the Ferdinand and Miranda scene in the first |