FAR AND NEAR 



** The slow toadstool comes bulging, moony white, 

 Through loosening loam. 



Sometimes this moon of the loam is red, or goldeiij 

 or bronzed; or it is so small that it suggests only a 

 star. The shy wood folk seem to know the edible 

 mushrooms, and I notice often eat away the stalk 

 and nibble at the top or pileus. 



One day two friends came to see me with some- 

 thing wrapped up in their handkerchiefs. They said 

 they had brought their dinner with them, — they 

 had gathered it in the woods as they came along, 

 — beefsteak mushrooms. The beefsteak was duly 

 cooked and my friends ate of it with a relish. A por- 

 tion was left, which my dog attacked rather doubt- 

 ingly, and then turned away from, with the look of 

 one who has been cheated. Mock-meat, that is what 

 it was, — a curious parody upon a steak, as the dog 

 soon found out. I know a man who boasts of hav- 

 ing identified and eaten seventy-five different spe- 

 cies. When the season is a good one for mushrooms, 

 he snaps his fingers at the meat trust, even going to 

 the extent of drying certain kinds to be used for 

 soup in the winter. 



The decay of a mushroom parodies that of real 

 flesh, — a kind of unholy rotting ending in black- 

 ness and stench. Some species imitate jelly, — mock 

 calves'-foot jelly, which soon melts down and be- 

 comes an uncanny mass. Occasionally I see a blue- 



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