66 MUSHROOM CULTURE. 



near Frepillon, Mery-sur-Oise a place which may be 

 reached in an hour or so by the Chemin de fer du Nord, 

 passing by Enghien, the valley of Montmorency and 

 Pontoise, and alighting at Auvers. There are vast 

 quarries in the neighbourhood,, both for building-stone 

 and the plaster so largely used in Paris. The materials 

 are not quarried in the ordinary way by opening up the 

 ground, nor by the method employed at Montrouge and 

 elsewhere in the suburbs of Paris, but so that the interior 

 of the earth looks like a vast gloomy cathedral. In 1867 the 

 mushroom culture was in full force at Mery, and as many 

 as 3000 Ibs. a day were sometimes sent from thence to 

 the Paris market ; but the mushroom is a thing of 

 peculiar taste, and these quarries are now empty cleaned 

 out and left to rest. After a time the great quarries 

 seem to become tired of their occupants, or the mush- 

 rooms dislike the air ; the quarries are then well cleaned 

 out, the very soil where the beds rested being scraped 

 away, and the place left to recruit itself for a year or 

 two. In 1867 M. Renaudot had the extraordinary length 

 of over twenty-one miles of mushroom-beds in one great 

 cave at Mery ; last year there were sixteen miles in a 

 cave at Frepillon. This is a clean, lonely village, just 

 touching on the gigantic cemetery which M. Haussmann 

 projected. 



The distant view of the entrance to the quarries has 

 much the appearance of an English chalk-pit. But 



