ouses, but I do not want them there; the cure is as bad as the
disease. The mushroom bed is a little paradise for the toad. He gets
upon it and burrows or elbows out a snug little hole for himself
wherever he wishes, and many of them, too, and cares nothing about
whether, in his efforts to make himself comfortable, he has heaved out
the finest clumps of young mushrooms in the beds.

=Fogging Off.=--This is one of the commonest ailments peculiar to
cultivated mushrooms. It consists in the softening, shriveling, and
perishing of part of the young mushrooms, which also usually assume a
brownish color. These withered mushrooms do not occur singly here and
there over the face of the bed, but in patches; generally all or nearly
all of the very small mushrooms in a clump will turn brown and soft, and
there is no help for them; they never will recover their plumpness. Some
writers attribute fogging off to unfavorable atmospheric
conditions,--the temperature may be too cold, or too hot, or the
atmosphere too moist, or too dry. I am convinced that fogging off is due
to the destruction of the mycelium threads that supported these
mushrooms; it is a disease of the "root," to use this expression; the
"roots" having been killed, the tops must necessarily perish. If it were
caused by unfavorable conditions above ground we should expect all of
the crop to be more or less injuriously affected; but this does not
occur; the mushrooms in one clump may be withered, and contiguous clumps
perfectly healthy.

Anything that will kill the spawn or mycelium threads will cause
fogging off to overtake every little mushroom that had been attached to
these mycelium threads. Keeping the bed or part of it continuously wet
or dry will cause fogging off, so will drip; watering with very cold
water is also said to cause it, but this I have not found to be the
case. Unfastening the ground by abruptly pulling up the large mushrooms
will destroy many of the small mushrooms and pinheads attached to the
same clump; and when large mushrooms push up through the soil and
displace some of the earth, all the small mushrooms so displaced will
probably waste away, as the threads of mycelium to which they were
attached for support have been severed. A common reason of fogging off
is caused by cutting off the mushrooms in gathering them and leaving the
stumps in the ground; in a few days' time these stumps develop a white
fluff or flecky substance, which seems to pois