For such pulpy, soft, almost immaterial-looking plants, mushrooms show a strange power to lift, which is caused, in reality, by hydraulic pressure within them, amounting to as much as six or eight pounds per square inch. They come up through an inch or two of concrete, or through the asphalt surface of a road. They move the heavy bark of old logs aside. One of them puts up a scaly dome under the edge of a pump house eave that almost touches the ground, as if it intended to lift the roof off. When we think of fungi, we have a justifiable association with rot and decay, mildew and mold. They lack chlorophyll, that famous green substance by which other plants are able to absorb the energy of the sunlight and through it convert carbon dioxide and water into food. The mushrooms, like other fungi, get their food directly from organic matter, rich soil, rotting wood, or leaf mold. They reproduce by billions of tiny spores, each of which, or rather, the comparatively few that catch, are started in such a matrix. In a sense they are procreative flowers of the darkness, annuals which the earth puts forth in its own teeming right, regardless of the gay slaves of the sunlight. But they are colorful. They wear the earth’s sulfurs, umbers, and ochers, its iron rusts, light greens, grays, and whites, as well as some startling rose-reds and vermilions. I find a small one in the wet leaves which is a lavender-blue, named, according to my reference book, the violet cortinarius, and good to eat--surprisingly enough. Color is no criterion of what is poisonous. The deadly amanita does not have the flickering blue-green color of something low and ominous, nor is it a dangerous red, a signal for all but the most reckless to keep off. Some of the reddest mushrooms, in point of fact, are the best to eat. But the deadly amanita is almost tempting in appearance. It is white and succulent-looking, and to eat enough of it means death.