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We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools.
All the assemblage of mushrooms and toadstools, although the most deadly may flaunt bright hues of scarlet and yellow, yet lack the healthy green of ordinary plants.
Still, I remembered long ago, hearing strange solutions whispered by the country people for the mystery involving his will, and, by reflex, himself; and that, too, as well in conscience as purse. It is queer what wild whimsies of rumors will, like toadstools, spring up about any eccentric stranger, who settling down among a rustic population, keeps quietly to himself.
Our own praises poison our Selves, and puff and swell them up, till they lose all shape and beauty, and become like great toadstools. But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. They never do them any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous.
I have felt the cold touch of loathsome toadstools and sniffed the hot, dry dust of the full, ripe puff-ball. On the Thames Embankment, up Chelsea way, I have at twilight beheld wonderful metamorphoses. In company with the shadows of natural objects of the landscape, have silently sprung up giant reeds and bullrushes.
I paid special attention to the ordinary toadstools and mushrooms, which announced their near advent by cracking the surface of the soil. Now these points, where my eyes divined the cryptogam pushing back the soil with its button-like heads, these points, where the ordinary fungoid odour was certainly very pronounced, were never selected by the dog.
At length, oh joy! the tired and torn little man, following carefully the leading-string, issued from the scratching bushes into a clean, beautiful, round place, with a great restful-looking stump in the centre, and round its base a small forest of snowy toadstools. What could be a lovelier surprise!
As the old woman was very talkative, Nanahboozhoo soon obtained from her all the information he desired. Among other things she told him that sometimes people came to her for bad medicines, to give to persons with whom they had quarreled, and in this way they would kill them with the poisons which she made out of toadstools and other deadly things.
The blue man had been here thirty-five years! He knew the childish joy of bruising the flesh of orange-colored toadstools and wading amid long pine-cones which strew the ground like fairy corncobs. The white birches were dear to him, and he trembled with eagerness at the first pipe sign, or at the discovery of blue gentians where the eastern forest stoops to the strand.
B says that there was formerly a tradition, that the Indians used to go up this brook, and return, after a brief absence, with large masses of lead, which they sold at the trading stations in Augusta; whence there has always been an idea that there is a lead mine hereabouts. Great toadstools were under the trees, and some small ones as yellow and almost the size of a half-broiled yolk of an egg.
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