The study of the larger fungi has been to me one of the greatest pleasures of my life: when all things else have failed, this has never failed; it has taken me into the pleasantest of places and amongst the best of people. Had it not been for fungi, I should have been dead years ago; often tired, jaded, and harassed with business matters, a stroll in the rich autumn woods has given me a renewed lease of life. In these favourite haunts I never tire or flag; rain, fog, and mud, never detract from the pleasures of the woods to me--I am only depressed in the hot, dry weather of midsummer. In the autumn I constantly visit the forests, with all my collecting paraphernalia; I sometimes take a saw to cut off the big, woody, fungus excrescences of trees. I was once fortunate enough to find a ladder in a wood, which proved invaluable for ascending the beeches in search of _Agaricus mucidus_, &c. I, however, find fungi everywhere: I only go round the corner, and there they are. I often visit a neighbouring builder's yard, and descend the sawpits, to the amazement of the operatives: some of the rarest species of our Flora, and many new ones, I have found within a few minutes' walk of my own house. I once found a rare _Lentinus_ on a log as it was being carted down King William Street, and a year or so ago an undescribed _Peziza_ flourished inside my cistern. Collecting fungi is not without its humours as well as its pleasures, as the following will show. I once saw a portly, well-dressed gentleman walking along the high road, with his vasculum over his shoulders, and carrying home (one in each hand) a pair of cast-off, rotten boots, discarded by some vagrant; the rotting leather having produced a crop of rare microscopic fungi. At times abominable cast-off foetid gipsy rags will be lovingly taken from out a ditch, and choice pieces cut out and consigned to the vasculum of the cryptogamic botanist; at other times some rare species will be seen "up a tree," and it has several times happened in my presence that one enthusiastic botanist has got on to the shoulders of another to secure a prize, or even waded into a pond to get at some prostrate fungus-bearing log. The humours of truffle hunting are manifold. I have seen a gentleman trespass, on hands and knees, through a holly hedge, on to a gentleman's lawn, and there dig up the turf in some promising spot, risking an attack from the house-dog, or a few shots from the proprietor; the said trespasser meanwhile armed with a rake, gouge, and dangerous-looking open knife. Country labourers are often sorely puzzled by the acts of cryptogamic botanists; they stand agape in utter amazement to witness poisonous "frog-stools" bagged by the score. Ofttimes one gets warned that the plants are "deadly pisin"; but collectors are usually looked upon as harmless lunatics, a climax in this direction generally being reached if a gentleman in search of _Ascoboli_ and the dung-borne