Weihaiwei July 22—The mushroom is the most provoking, perplexing, pernicketty plant ever created to break the heart of a gardener: every year I try to grow mushrooms from spawn, and every year they just turn round and laugh at me: this year a little of the spawn blew out of the bowl in which I carried it across the lawn; so a beautiful mushroom' grew up in the middle of the grass where no mushroom ever grew before while the only thing which came out of the carefully prepared mushroom-bed was a handful of toadstools: its most provoking. I must also note that whereas I seldom find mushrooms growing here in the lowlands where cattle are grazed, I often find them up in the barren hillsides where they seem to grow just for spite: so I looked up some facts about mushrooms, and this is what I found. The mushroom is a sdphrophytic fungus, which means that it is a plant which feeds upon decaying matter: it is first cousin to the green streaks in a Gorgonzola cheese and to all other forms of mould: the true plant grows beneath the surface like a mass of tiny veins and only the reproductive organs appear above the: earth: the spores (which take the place of seeds) are produced on. the gills beneath the well-known "umbrella" which we eat (Nature's anticipation of our familiar "brolly"): the spores are so tiny that a large mushroom can produce ten thousand million of them, and these are carried through the air to immense heights' by the. wind....hence the mushrooms in the hills: and hence this story once told me by the Bishop of Fulham, In Spain death in gutter.
Wife, of course, can see how it all happened. Worm has been in low tavern with cadging worm friends boasting" about last war, and then worm and low friends, in disgusting state of intoxication, and feeling very brave, joined If worm works at office all day and walks about all night worm will have nervous breakdown through lack of sleep and then worm will lose job. And, in any case, what is use of soldier with nervous breakdown?
If worm were not selfish, egotistical show-off worm, he would have thought of wife first. Instead of spending nights staring at sky, or, what is more likely, drinking himself to death in house of witty worm friend, worm might have stayed at home to protect wife instead of leaving her to face invaders alone with baby worm.
Depressed worm picks up rifle and walks out into night on first patrol.
—Gubbins in the "Sunday Express."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.