THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 11, 13 January 1934, Page 8

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

A few wliiffles of mushrooms have been sighted in the South, and within a reasonable time the Northern townsman will be cranking his morning car to beat THE COMING the fanner for the first CAMPAIGN, fruits of the season. _It has always been a legitimate grievance of the owner of fields that-the townsman regards an unguarded mushroom as fair game. Owners of mushroomy, fields, exuberant with phenomenal wool cheques will this year undoubtedly bo even more tolerant than usual with the morning mushroomer. In countries where the owner of paddocks guards his mushrooms with a g'un, the town ]grower, aching for mushrooms, buys a packet lof seeds— that is to say, a block of spawnprepares a bed in the cellar, and produces his own. If he hasn't a cellar, a dark, nasty corner, some wet earth and a few bags as a hothouse have sufficed to bring these delicacies (real or alleged) to the dining table. Ardent mushroomers vie with cacli other, in the search for mushrooms of phenomenal size. A man with a perfectly inedible mushroom as big as a dinner plate boasts about it for months—but the fellow who cleans up another fellow's paddock before the other fellow is out of bed boasts even harder. The townsman with the ear, the basket and the rhinoceros hide is trembling on the mark at the moment, listening fw the starting pistol. No mushroom present o or potential is eafc. May all the pinchers mistake toadstools for the genuine article! T'he mushroom ketchup season will arrive, too. You get a hundredweight of mushrooms, boil 'em down to a pint, and you "have a sauce that tastes just like salt- and water coloured with ink. It's fine.