United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
What of the green film which is drawn over every moist tree-trunk or shaded wall, or of the emerald film which coats the water of the pond's edge? Or the gray lichens painting the rocks and logs, toning down the shingles; the toadstools which, like pale vegetable ghosts, spring up in a night from the turf; or the sombre puff balls which seem dead from their birth?
He shuddered as he thought of the loathsome form his decaying fancy had taken, that morning by the Three Black Ponds. He had filled the small outstretched hands with Nature's filth and poison. She had asked for flowers, he had brought her toadstools. Oh, the shame, the crime, the anguish!
There were great rank growths of toadstools, yellow, blue, livid white, or spotted like adders, which squirmed and squelched underfoot to send up a sickly odour of decay. The only green thing was some ivy, a parasitic vampire which drew its lifeblood from the mouldering corpse of an old church.
It had come back with the surprise of some supernatural mechanism; it was as though the sofa, chairs, pictures had five minutes before been grass and toadstools in a world of mist and now were sofa, chairs and pictures again. He was absolutely sane, whereas half an hour ago he had been held almost by an enchantment.
The whole mind becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one 'punctual spot' of knowledge. A rank unhealthy soil breeds a harvest of prejudices. Feeling himself above others in his one little branch in the classification of toadstools, or Carthaginian history he waxes great in his own eyes and looks down on others.
I know where to get scarlet toadstools, and I put the juice in his men's ale: they are laughing and roaring now, merry-mad every one of them." "But not he?" "No, no. He is with the Marquis. But in madness comes out truth; and that long hook-nosed body-varlet of his has told us all." And she told Torfrida who Hereward was, and the secret mark.
A toadstool that vegetable which springs to full growth in a single night had torn loose and lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice its own bulk into the air, and supported it there, like a column supporting a shed. Ten thousand toadstools, with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose. But what good would it do? All our afternoon's progress had been uphill.
"Well, I believe there is a branch railroad line about ten miles away," said Captain Clark, "and if we have to " "We can walk, of course!" interrupted Cleo. "That's a mere sprint. A ten-mile hike is a trifle." "Did you say triffle or truffle?" asked Grace. "Truffles don't grow here, nothing but mushrooms and toadstools," broke in Margaret. "All Girl Scouts ought to know that!"
But by going with them, guiding our careers along their courses, they will bear us to the port we're steering for. The mob spirit in man is one of those blind forces that so often lead to shipwreck. The mob-mind differs from the mind of reason. To tell them apart is like distinguishing mushrooms from toadstools. They look alike, but one means health and the other is poison.
They were somewhat browner than they were when they left town in June, but they were not otherwise changed. Lily, the elder of the girls, had brought back a number of studies of kelp and toadstools, with accessory rocks and rotten logs, which she would never finish up and never show any one, knowing the slightness of their merit.
Word Of The Day