It requires somewhat of the heroic spirit to discover whether a mushroom is edible or not. But we may feast our eyes on the amanita, and all other mushrooms, with no fear of consequences. The mycologist seems to overlook the finer and esthetic value of mushrooms. They are beautiful to look upon--surely this is one important qualification. What more attractive these misty days than the deadly amanita--the "destroying angel"? How it gleams in the woods! How it lures with its terrible beauty! But they who are tempted to taste must be wholly given over to the pleasures of the table. It was not made for the stomach, but to be digested and assimilated by mental processes alone and the perception of beauty thereby nourished and sustained. How clean and wholesome is the pasture mushroom--_the_ mushroom--with its white flesh, pink gills, and cap from which the skin peels as readily as from a fig. The same field is often sprinkled over with puffballs looking as fresh as new-laid eggs, as they poke out of the close-cropped turf. Some species are thus eminently wholesome and inviting, while others have a loathsome fungoid personality and affect one like the sight of reptiles. They express the fact that they are of the _lower orders_--the slimy world. Mushrooms are indeed almost as varied in outline and color as flowers. Red species of russula vie with the rose, with ripe cherries, or the cheeks of Bartlett pears, while the green russula is of richer, more velvety hue than any unripe fruit. The grotesque forms of boleti have a kind of fascination. One comes to distinguish minute differences and to cherish these odd and sometimes graceful shapes, as a connoisseur might his bronzes or antique vases. Many of the mosses are fruiting at this season, but they, for the most part, belong to that mysterious and unfathomable world of the compound microscope. Yet here are some, be it said with joy, that so proclaim themselves as to be known of all men. Such we can take home to us as friends of our leisure and landmarks in our excursions. These at least we have reclaimed from science. In the shadowy sea of Latin names these few green isles appear--peat-moss, broom-moss, hair-cap and fern-moss. Like miniature smilax are the mniums, marvelous little trailing beauties, while of all vegetable elves the silvery bryum has the greatest witchery, with young drooping pea-green capsules like so many fairy pipes. A miniature jungle is the fern-moss, a forest of tree ferns at our very doors--Ceylon and Java in our wood lot. It is only a difference of dimension. A patch of this is as rich and luxuriant as any jungle of bamboos on the lower slope of the Himalaya, and a spider might as easily lose himself in one as a man in the other. [Illustration: AUTUMN STUDIES COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY RUDOLF EICKEMEYER]