III.


No one knows what the Vicar made of the Giant Puff-Balls.

No doubt he was among the first to discover them. They were scattered at
intervals up and down the path between the near down and the village
end--a path he frequented daily in his constitutional round. Altogether,
of these abnormal fungi there were, from first to last, quite thirty.
The Vicar seems to have stared at each severally, and to have prodded
most of them with his stick once or twice. One he attempted to measure
with his arms, but it burst at his Ixion embrace.

He spoke to several people about them, and said they were "marvellous!"
and he related to at least seven different persons the well-known story
of the flagstone that was lifted from the cellar floor by a growth of
fungi beneath. He looked up his Sowerby to see if it was _Lycoperdon
coelatum_ or _giganteum_--like all his kind since Gilbert White became
famous, he Gilbert-Whited. He cherished a theory that _giganteum_ is
unfairly named.

'One does not know if he observed that those white spheres lay in the
very track that old woman of yesterday had followed, or if he noted that
the last of the series swelled not a score of yards from the gate of the
Caddles' cottage. If he observed these things, he made no attempt to
place his observation on record. His observation in matters botanical