mushrooms--especially mushrooms, for we were fond
of them and had carefully acquainted ourselves with the deadly kinds.
Those, by the way, are all that one needs to know. All the others may be
eaten. Some of them may taste like gall and wormwood, or living and
enduring fire, and an occasional specimen may make the experimenter feel
briefly unwell, but if he will acquaint himself with the virulent
amanita varieties, and shun them, he will not die--not from poison. I do
not guarantee against indigestion.

We would bring home as many as seventeen sorts of those edible
toadstools, beautiful things in creamy white, brown, purple, yellow,
coral, and vivid scarlet, and get out our _Book of a Thousand Kinds_,
and patiently identify them, tasting for the flavor and sometimes
getting a hot one or a bitter one, but often putting as many as a dozen
kinds into the chafing-dish. Even if the result was occasionally a bit
"woodsy" as to savor, we did not mind much, not in those days of
novelty, though Elizabeth did once think she felt a "little dizzy" after
an unusually large collection, and I had a qualm or two myself. But when
we looked up and found that mushroom poison does not begin to destroy
for several hours, we fell to discussing other matters, and did not
remember our slight inconvenience until long after we should have been
dead, by the book limitation.

There was a gap in the stone wall where we passed from our land into
Westbury's, and beyond it an open place that was a mushroom-garden.
Green and purple russulas grew there as if they had been planted, beds
of coral-hued "Tom Thumbs" that were like strawberries, and a big,
bitter variety of boletus, worthless but beautiful, having the size and
appearance of a pie--a meringue pie, well browned. A path led to another
garden where in a hidden nook we one day discovered a quantity of
chanterelles that were like wonderful black morning-glories. It was
duskily shaded there, and through the flickering green we noticed a
vivid, red spot that was like a flame. We pushed out to it and came upon
a tiny, silent brook slipping through a bed of cowslip and water-arum,
and at its margin a scarlet cardinal-flower, burning a star upon the
afternoon.

[Illustration]

There was a place which we sometimes visited to see the trout. You
crossed the bean-lot and came to a little secluded land where there were
slim cedars and grass and asters and goldenrod, a spot so still and
unvisited that i