, 1865. A gas-lit scene of bustle and
hurry. Gone. A minute's waiting in a snow-powdered road, carpet-bag in
hand, and four-horsed coach ramping along with a frosty gleam of lamps.
A jingle of harness, and an adventurous tooting from the guard's horn,
as if a charge was being sounded. Gone. Snow Hill, Birmingham, all white
and glistening. An extraordinary bustle and clamour. A phantasmagoria of
strange faces and figures. Gone. A station all in darkness, but full of
echoes and voices. Gone.

A buffet at Oxford, and an instantaneous glimpse of people scalding
their throats with an intolerable decoction called coffee extract.
The figure of an imperious guard with a waving lamp. The vision of a
stampede. Gone. Then an interlude of sleep, during which an orchestra
plays dream music, with a roll, roll, roll of wheels as a musical
groundwork to the theme. Then Paddington, in a fog--a real London
particular, now for the first time seen, felt, tasted, sneezed at,
coughed at, wept over. Distracted biographic figures rampant everywhere.
Gone. A vision of streets, populous, and full of movement, but
half-invisible in a pea-soup haze, through which the gas that takes the
place of daylight most ineffectually glimmers. Gone. Then a room, still
gas-lit when it should be broad day; a table spread with napery none too
clean; a landlady in a dressing-gown and curl-papers; and breakfast. The
biograph ceases to whirl by at its original speed, and I can take breath
here, and can begin to analyse myself and my own surroundings.

To begin with, this is London; and to continue, I don't think much of
it. This is a London egg, and this is London bacon, and this exiguous
liquid which "laves the milk-jug with celestial blue" is London milk.
All the flavours are strange. The atmosphere is strange. The sight of a
lady in curlpapers at 10 a.m. is strange.

Now, in setting down all these things, I begin to take new notice of a
fact which has long been familiar to me. It has been expressed by more
than one poet, and the reason for it may be found in the works of more
than one man of science; but the fact itself is that every one of these
cinemato-graphical exercises is associated with a special odour. These
special odours have each one so often recurred that they have driven
home certain memories in such wise as to make them stick. The fire
in the old home kitchen had been "raked" as we used to say in South
Staffordshire, overnight, and it gave forth