Coombes breaks off'a piece, and the creamy white of the 
inside changes in ten seconds to a yellowish green color, 
which suggests what the modern world knows as a bole- 
tus. He remembers that his father had described this 
very species to him, and they were the deadliest poison. 
He tastes the thing. It is pungent. He almost spits it 
out, but then it seems merely hot to the taste and full- 
flavored, a kind of German mustard with horse-radish. 
He swallows it. There ensues a curious tingling sensa- 
tion in his finger-tips and toes. His pulse quickens. ‘The 
blood in his ears sounds like a mill-race. He loses his 
balance, falls, forgets everything. While he lies there 
unconscious, a peculiar transformation takes place in his 
personality, for after a while he wakes up feeling bright 
and cheerful, his complexion a livid white, his eyes large 
and bright, his pale lips drawn in a cheerless grin. The 
mild little man is now a lion, fit to be master of his 
house. He goes home, and inascene of violent retribu- 
tion he imposes his will on his wife and that noisome 
friend of hers. He is so successful that the reformation 
in his household proves lasting, and the whole course of 
Coombes’s life is changed for the better. 
Coombes’s exhilaration might suggest that he ate 
Amanita muscaria, but Wells expressly distinguishes 
his purple pileus from that other species, ‘the red ones 
with white spots’. Wells, like Bramah and Sherriff, fills 
out the necessities of a given plot by inventing the 
needed mushroom, on which we here might facetiously 
bestow the name of Boletus wellsoides. 
Have English authors ever invented flowers or shrubs 
or trees with which to adorn the English countryside 
It seems unlikely. Surrounded by mushrooms on which 
they never fix their gaze, they usually ignore them, and 
on the rare occasions when ‘toadstools’ are needed, they 
blithely misrepresent them, to make them serve an 
odious or exotic purpose. 
[ 107 ] 
