“Dear Mr. Gibson:
“We hesitated a long time before coming to you with this question. We knew that so many must worry you in the same way, and yet we have come at last like the rest. I can only hope you will forgive us. We live on Anticosti, an island with a very bad name in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I know you never heard a good word of it. I must beg you, though, to believe that it is as much belied as the toadstools you championed last year. Its woods and plains are full of treasures and among them goodly stores of those same toadstools. They were all under the ban, though, as in other places and we dared only look at them regretfully.
“You don’t know how glad we were when you broke the spell in ‘Harper’s’ last summer. I don’t think anybody else was so glad. You know we live alone here and try to make friends of ‘all out-doors’ and anything like this means more to us than to most people.
“For a while then we were happy. We knew you and we had faith enough in ourselves to believe that we were able to understand anything you wrote for everyday folks, let alone something that led them among deadly poisons. But very soon we began to fret. Nearly every toadstool we met near home was a Russula and generally far larger and more delicious-looking than anything else we could find far or near.
“They went through every shade of redness and pinkness and pepperiness. I should be afraid to say how often I vowed with pricking lips that I would taste no more. Some ‘were not so very red or so very peppery’ and then ‘how very far Mr. Gibson must be keeping on the safe side for the sake of stupid people.’ I tried cooking some of them though I felt in my heart that they were the same as the rest and found them very good. But every one was, and very reasonably, shy of them.
“At this critical time we came across the article enclosed.
“Here was another excitement. But who was Charles McIlvaine? ‘He knows what he is talking about anyway,’ I said, ‘and I am going to try the whole red tribe’; and I did.
“They were all he said and after a while the others took courage and we even gave some to a friend who had discovered the common mushroom for us.
“I felt misgivings all through the winter, though, about the coming season. I did not want to risk unpleasantness and ‘emeticus’ is such a very ominous name. And who was McIlvaine, after all? Wasn’t it rash to listen to him?
“And lo and behold you talk now in the ‘Bazar’ of Captain Charles McIlvaine the eminent mycologist!