All the manure employed is brought from Paris by rail, as the place is twenty-five miles from that city by road. In the first place, so much per month is paid in Paris for the manure of each horse; then it has to be carted to the railway station and loaded in the waggons; next it is brought to the station of Auvers, and afterwards carted a couple of miles to the quarries, paying a toll for a bridge over the Oise on the way. That surely is difficulty enough for a cultivator to begin with! Then it is placed in great flat heaps a yard deep by about thirty long and ten wide, not far removed from the mouth of the cave, and here it is prepared, turned over and well mixed three times, and as a rule watered twice. About five or six weeks are occupied in the preparation, long manure requiring more time than short. The watering is not usually done regularly over the mass, but chiefly where it is dry and overheated. Every day manure is brought from Paris; every day new beds are made and old ones cleared out--the spent manure being used for garden purposes, particularly in surfacing or mulching, so as to prevent over-radiation from the ground in summer. The chief advantage the cultivator here has is the facility of taking his manure or anything else in or out in carts, as easily as if the beds were made in the open air. Near Paris, on the contrary, everything has to be sent up and down through shafts like those of an old well, and the men have to creep up and down a rough pole like mice. Many men are employed in the culture, the daily examination of sixteen miles of beds being a considerable item in itself. Here and there a barrier in the form of straw nailed between laths may be seen blocking up the great arch to a height of six feet or so. This is to prevent currents of air wandering about through the vast passages. The mode of preparing the spawn here is entirely different to ours. They prefer virgin spawn--that is to say, spawn found naturally in a heap of manure. But as this material cannot be obtained in sufficient quantity to meet the wants of such extensive growers, they put a small portion of it into a mushroom-bed to spread, and instead of allowing this bed to produce mushrooms, it is all used as spawn, and is valued more than any other. Of course abundance of spawn occurs in the old beds, but it is never used directly. It is, however, frequently employed to spawn a small bed when virgin spawn cannot be obtained. In this case the small bed devoted to the propagation of spawn is placed in the open air, and covered with straw, and as soon as it is permeated with the spawn it is carried into the caves and used. As the making and spawning of beds is a process continually going on, a bed of this sort must be ready at all times. It is never made into bricks as with us, but simply spread through short, partly-decomposed, manure.[A]