“Uncle!”
“I mean it, Vane. There, dabble in your little schemes for a bit, and you shall either go to college or to some big civil engineer as a pupil, but you must recollect the great poet’s words.”
“What are they, uncle?” said Vane, in a disappointed tone.
“‘There is a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may.’
“Now let’s have a little more botany. What’s that?”
“Orange peziza,” said Vane, pouncing upon a little fungus cup; and this led the doctor into a dissertation on the beauty of these plants, especially of those which required a powerful magnifying glass to see their structure.
Farther on they entered a patch of fir-wood where a little search rewarded them with two or three dozen specimens of the orange milk mushroom, a kind so agreeable to the palate that the botanists have dubbed it delicious.
“Easy enough to tell, Vane,” said the doctor, as he carefully removed every scrap of dirt and grass from the root end of the stem, and carefully laid the neatly-shaped dingy-green round-table shaped fungi in his basket upon some moss. “It is not every edible fungus that proves its safety by invariably growing among fir trees and displaying this thick rich red juice like melted vermilion sealing-wax.”
“And when we get them home, Martha will declare that they are rank poison,” said Vane.
“And all because from childhood she has been taught that toadstools are poison. Some are, of course, boy, so are some wild fruits, but it would be rather a deprivation for us if we were to decline to eat every kind of fruit but one.”