Consider, for instance, how slight, how fortuitous, a stimulus will
startle some memory-pigeon from a slumber of twenty-six years. I was arguing yesterday upon the fascinating theme of corporal punishment when suddenly I became aware that a memory-pattern had obtruded itself into the foreground of my consciousness. I was no longer sitting upon the brick terrace of a Kentish garden holding a small blue flower in my hand. I was perched upon one of the towers of the Yedi Koule at Istanbul, and around me, unruffled as a lapis pavement, stretched the Sea of Marmora, with the Islands and Olympus beyond. For a moment I was at a loss to understand why this memory of the loveliest of all European views should have obtruded upon a dis- cussion of Sir Samuel Hoare's admirable endeavours to abolish sadism from our penal system. The stimulus which had stirred this pigeon from its slumber was the little flower which I held in my hand. It was not the ordinary grape hyacinth, or April grape ; it was the more rare muscari moschatum, which has the scent of hothouse grapes dipped in musk. These nice little flowers grow in profusion in the crumbling fissures of the Seven Towers. The spring air is heavy with their tired Byzantine smell. My pigeon left his little niche and circled slowly around the walls of the dovecote. Memory became alive.
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