home > books by FWB > 1915 Mushrooms On The Moor

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

I have allowed the Mushrooms on the Moor to throw the glamour of their name over the entire volume because, in some respects, they are the most typical and representative things in it. They express so little but suggest so much! What fun we had, in the days of auld lang syne, when we scoured the dewy fields in search of them! And yet how small a proportion of our enjoyment the mushrooms themselves represented! Our flushed cheeks, our prodigious appetites, and our boisterous merriment told of gains immensely greater than any that our baskets could have held. What a contrast, for example, between mushrooms from the moor on the one hand and mushrooms from the market on the other! What memories of the soft summer mornings; the fresh and fragrant air; the diffused and misty sunshine; the sparkle of the dew on the tall wisps of speargrass; the beaded and shining cobwebs; the scamper, barefooted, across the glittering green! It was part of childhood’s wild romance. And, in the sterner days that have followed those tremendous frolics, we have learned that life is full of just such suggestive things. As I glance back upon the years that lie behind me, I find that they have been almost equally divided between two hemispheres. But I have discovered that, under any stars,

There’s part o’ the sun in an apple;
There’s part o’ the moon in a rose;
There’s part o’ the flaming Pleiades
In every leaf that grows.
And I shall reckon this book no failure if some of the ideas that I have tried to suggest are found to point at all steadily to that conclusion.

FRANK W. BOREHAM.

HOBART, TASMANIA, JUNE, 1915.