ing
discreet people, they knew how to moderate their speech and their
movements, in order under all circumstances to adapt them to the place and
time. Therefore, before they followed the Judge to the wood, they had
assumed a different bearing, and put on different attire, linen dusters
suitable for a stroll, with which they covered and protected their
kontuszes; and on their heads they wore straw hats, so that they looked
white as spirits in Purgatory. The young people had also changed their
clothes, except Telimena and a few who wore French attire.--This scene the
Count had not understood, being unfamiliar with village customs; hence,
amazed beyond measure, he ran full speed to the wood.

Of mushrooms51 there were plenty: the lads gathered the fair-cheeked
_fox-mushrooms_, so famous in the Lithuanian songs as the emblem of
maidenhood, for the worms do not eat them, and, marvellous to say, no
insect alights on them; the young ladies hunted for the slender
_pine-lover_, which the song calls the colonel of the mushrooms.52 All
were eager for the _orange-agaric;_ this, though of more modest stature
and less famous in song, is still the most delicious, whether fresh or
salted, whether in autumn or in winter. But the Seneschal gathered the
toadstool _fly-bane_.

The remainder of the mushroom family are despised because they are
injurious or of poor flavour, but they are not useless; they give food to
beasts and shelter to insects, and are an ornament to the groves. On the
green cloth of the meadows they rise up like lines of table dishes: here
are the _leaf-mushrooms_ with their rounded borders, silver, yellow, and
red, like little glasses filled with various sorts of wine; the _kozlak_,
like the bulging bottom of an upturned cup; the _funnels_, like slender
champagne glasses; the round, white, broad, flat _whities_, like china
coffee-cups filled with milk; and the round _puff-ball_, filled with a
blackish dust, like a pepper-shaker. The names of the others are known
only in the language of hares or wolves; by men they have not been
christened, but they are innumerable. No one deigns to touch the wolf or
hare varieties; but whenever a person bends down to them, he straightway
perceives his mistake, grows angry and breaks the mushroom or kicks it
with his foot: in thus defiling the grass he acts with great indiscretion.

Telimena gathered neither the mushrooms of wolves nor those of humankind;
distracted and bored, she gaz