“And why, pray?”

“Because it contains not a single inhabitant.  Moreover, gentlemen, while you were sleeping I have taken a pretty extensive stroll.  The vineyards lie unkempt, the vines themselves unthinned, up to the edge of the forest.  The olive-trees have not been tended, but have shed their fruit for years with no man to gather.  Many even have cracked and fallen under the weight of their crops.  But no trace of beast, wild or tame, did I discover; no dung, no signs of trampling.  The valley is utterly desolate.”

“It grows mushrooms,” said Mr. Fett, cheerfully, piling a heap of dry twigs; “and we have ship’s butter and a frying-pan.”

“Are you sure,” asked Mr. Badcock, examining one, “that these are true mushrooms?”

“They were grown in Corsica, and have not subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles; still, mutatis mutandis, in my belief they are good mushrooms.  If you doubt, we can easily make sure by stewing them awhile in a saucepan and stirring them with a silver spoon, or boiling them gently with Mr. Badcock’s watch, as was advised by Mr. Locke, author of the famous ‘Essay on the Human Understanding.’”

“Indeed?” said my father.  “The passage must have escaped me.”

“It does not occur in the ‘Essay.’  He gave the advice at Montpellier to an English family of the name of Robinson; and had they listened to him it would have robbed Micklethwaite’s ’Botany of Pewsey and Devizes’ of some fascinating pages.”

MR. FETT’S STORY OF THE FUNGI OF MONTPELLIER.

“About the year 1677, when Mr. Locke resided at Montpellier for the benefit of his health, and while his famous ‘Essay’ lay as yet in the womb of futurity, there happened to be staying in the same pension an English family—­”

“Excuse me,” put in my father, “I do not quite gather where these people lodged.”

“The sentence was faultily constructed, I admit.  They were lodging in the same pension as Mr. Locke.  The family consisted of a Mrs. Robinson, a widow; her son Eustace, aged seventeen; her daughter Laetitia, a child of fourteen, suffering from a slight pulmonary complaint; her son’s tutor, whose name I forget for the moment, but he was a graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and an ardent botanist; and a good-natured English female named Maria Wilkins, an old servant whom Mrs. Robinson had brought from home—­Pewsey, in Wiltshire—­to attend upon this Laetitia.  The Robinsons, you gather, were well-to-do; they were even well connected; albeit their social position did not quite warrant their story being included in the late Mr. D’Arcy Smith’s ’Tragedies and Vicissitudes of Our County Families.’

“It appears that the lad Eustace, perceiving that his sister’s delicate health procured her some indulgences, complained of headaches, which he attributed to a too intense application upon the ‘Memorabilia’ of Xenophon, and cajoled his mother into packing him off with the tutor on a holiday expedition to the neighbouring mountains of Garrigues.  From this they returned two days later about the time of dejeuner, with a quantity of mushrooms, which the tutor, who had discovered them, handed around for inspection, asserting them to be edible.