open the kitchen
door. In a few minutes I'll see you straighten up, lift your head, sniff
a little, and come straight for the house."

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

My father before me had a singularly keen nose. I remember well when I
was a boy and drove with him in the wild North Country, often through
miles 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, afar
off, the common odours of the work of man.

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

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

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

It is well known that when one sense is defective the others fly to the
rescue, and my father's singular development of the sense of smell may
have been due in part to this defect, though I believe it to have been,
to a far larger degree, a native gift. Me had a downright good nose. All
his life long he enjoyed with more than ordinary keenness the odour of
flowers, and would often pick a sprig of wild rose and carry it along
with him in his hand, sniffing at it from time to time, and he loved the
lilac, as I do after him. To ill odours he was not less sensitive, and
was impatient of rats in the barn, and could smell them, among other
odours, the moment the door was opened. He always had a peculiar
sensitiveness to the presence of animals, as of dogs, cats, muskrats,
cattle, horses, and the like, and would speak of them long before he had
seen them or could know that they were about.

I recall once on a wild Northern lake, when we were working along the
shore in a boat, how he stopped suddenly and exclaimed:

"David, do you hear anything?"--for I, a boy, was ears for him in those
wilderness places.

"No, Father. What is it?"

"Indians."

And, sure enough, in a short time I heard the barking of their dogs and
we came soon upon the