ntly smiling lotus eater.

He had, to be sure--in a spurt of energy that subsided almost as
quickly as it came--begun a song to that sybaritic state, in which it
was represented as a lady around whose neck hung

A chain ablaze with diamond days
All on the seasons strung,

which he thought sounded rather well.

Then, unfortunately, the rains set in and the result was a mental
washout that carried the last vestige of his poetical idea out into
the vasty deep where individual ideas become world-thought, though
there was a moment when he had an inspiration--something about keeping
Lent, which should typify the rains. But this, too, drifted off like a
chip on an ocean, and the song became mere literary junk.

Probably the law of compensation is responsible for the fact that,
while the coast's dazzling summer is flawed by trade winds, its rainy
season is tempered by mushrooms. At least, so thought Van Mater.
Connoisseur that he was in the joys of living, he confessed to a new
sensation when, for the first time, he found himself plodding over the
seared, round-shouldered hills, spongy with the supererogatory wetness
of a three days' downpour. The rain had ceased temporarily, but the
sky wore a look of ineffable gloom, and the feathery mist trailed
along the earth like an uneasy ghost.

Some swarthy, dark-eyed Portuguese children, met on the road the day
before, had proffered him their pail of spoil, and as he examined its
contents he understood, for the first time, what a mushroom really
ought to be. Their dank odor--the odor of germinating things--seemed
to come from down in the earth where the gnomes are supposed to
foregather; and Van Mater's thoughts reverted with withering scorn to
certain woodeny, tan objects that had been foisted upon him from time
to time as mushrooms--always, he now triumphantly recalled, to his own
inward amazement.

Why, when and where mushrooms had won their vogue with epicures, he
had often dumbly wondered, though he had remained silent lest he
expose a too abysmal ignorance. Now he chuckled hilariously. It was
his acceptance of those frauds--those mere shells from which the souls
had fled--that displayed ignorance! In future he would know better,
and he tossed the children a quarter and went his way, in a pleasant
anticipation of the manner in which he would carelessly throw off to
certain admiring friends:

"But I never eat mushrooms, save they come straight to the table from
the