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Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy, stories by Frank R Stockton |
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A Giant Puff-Ball |
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I suppose you have all seen puff-balls, which grow in the fields like mushrooms and toadstools, but I am quite sure that you never saw anything of the kind quite so large as that one in the picture. And yet that engraving was made from a drawing from the puff-ball itself. So we need not suppose that there is anything fanciful about it. The vegetable in question is a kind of _fungi_ called the Giganti Lycoperdon, and it attains its enormous size in one night! It springs from a seed so small that you could not see it, and grows, while you are asleep, to be bigger, perhaps, than you are yourself! Think of that! How would you like to plant the whole garden, some afternoon, with that kind of seed? Would not your father and mother, and everybody else, be astounded when they woke up and saw a couple of hundred of those things, as big as barrels, filling up every bed! They would certainly think it was the most astonishing crop they had ever seen, and there might be people who would suppose that fairies or magicians had been about. The great trouble about such a crop would be that it would be good for nothing. I cannot imagine what any one would do with a barnful of Lycoperdons. But it would be wonderfully interesting to watch the growth of such a _fungus_. You could see it grow. In one night you could see its whole life, from almost nothing at all to that enormous ball in the picture. Nature could hardly show us a more astonishing sight than that. |
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