that the victim expires within a half-hour of his seizure. 
More notable than Amanita bhuroides is the fictitious 
‘*Panaeolus sherriffoides’’, as we shall call the mush- 
room that the playright R.C. Sherriff devises for his 
drama Miss Mabel. His plot is unhappy, for we are ex- 
pected to sympathize with a kindly, somewhat demented 
heroine who poisons her wealthy and hateful sister, the 
widow Fletcher. The mycophile watches with astonish- 
ment as the author, by a very act of creation, invents his 
mushroom and clothes it with precisely those attributes 
that the plot requires. It appears in the spring: the daf- 
todils are in bloom and Easter is yet to come. (In nature 
there are almost no mushrooms then.) It grows fast, 
progressing noticeably in the course of a night’s rain. 
A cluster of nine serves as the lethal dose, but the play- 
wright suggests that fewer would have sufficed. When 
cooked, the mushrooms smell like hot rubber, but the 
smell is successfully overlaid with onions and tomatoes. 
Most remarkable are the toxic properties. These fungi 
are a powerful narcotic and put the victim to sleep at 
once. ‘The widow Fletcher departs this life without pain, 
her ugly, resentful face assuming in death ‘a look of such 
peace and gentleness’ that the audience is presumably 
reconciled to her hurried departure at the hands of her 
sister. 
Yet another inventor of mushrooms is H.G. Wells in 
his short story, The Purple Pileus. Here a mild- 
mannered, milk-toast of a man named Coombes, lower 
middle-class, finds himself browbeaten by his wife and 
her odious friend, Clarence, to the point of desperation 
and suicide. He rushes from the house into the woods. 
He thinks of drowning himself, but suddenly notices all 
the varied mushrooms around his feet. A purple pileus 
catches his eye, ‘a peculiarly poisonous looking purple’, 
slimy, shining, emitting a sour odor but not disgusting. 
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