hard
professional life, and it has been enough to keep us in this pleasant
place, and bring up and educate you. I am quite convinced that if I had
ten times as much I should be no happier, and really, my boy, I don't
think I should like to see you a rich man."

"Uncle!"

"I mean it, Vane. There, dabble in your little schemes for a bit, and
you shall either go to college or to some big civil engineer as a pupil,
but you must recollect the great poet's words."

"What are they, uncle?" said Vane, in a disappointed tone.

"`There is a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may.'

"Now let's have a little more botany. What's that?"

"Orange peziza," said Vane, pouncing upon a little fungus cup; and this
led the doctor into a dissertation on the beauty of these plants,
especially of those which required a powerful magnifying glass to see
their structure.

Farther on they entered a patch of fir-wood where a little search
rewarded them with two or three dozen specimens of the orange milk
mushroom, a kind so agreeable to the palate that the botanists have
dubbed it delicious.

"Easy enough to tell, Vane," said the doctor, as he carefully removed
every scrap of dirt and grass from the root end of the stem, and
carefully laid the neatly-shaped dingy-green round-table shaped fungi in
his basket upon some moss. "It is not every edible fungus that proves
its safety by invariably growing among fir trees and displaying this
thick rich red juice like melted vermilion sealing-wax."

"And when we get them home, Martha will declare that they are rank
poison," said Vane.

"And all because from childhood she has been taught that toadstools are
poison. Some are, of course, boy, so are some wild fruits, but it would
be rather a deprivation for us if we were to decline to eat every kind
of fruit but one."

"I should think it would," cried Vane, "or two."

"And yet, that is what people have for long years done in England.
Folks abroad are wiser. There, it's time we went back."

Vane was very silent on his homeward way, for the doctor had damped him
considerably, and the bright career which he had pictured for himself as
an inventor was beginning to be shrouded in clouds.

"Civil engineer means a man who surveys and measures land for roads and
railways, and makes bridges," said Vane to himself. "I don't think I
should like that. Rather go to a balloon manufactory and--"

He stopped to think of the sub