Humphrey Pump’s cooking of a fungus¹ in an old frying-pan (which he had found on the beach) was extremely typical of him. He was, indeed, without any pretence² of book-learning, a certain kind of scientific man that science has really been unfortunate in losing. He was the old-fashioned English Naturalist³ like Gilbert White or even Isaac Walton, who learned things not academically like an American Professor, but actually, like an American Indian. And every truth a man has found out as a man of science is always subtly different from any truth he has found out as a man, because a man’s family, friends, habits and social type have always got well under way before he has thoroughly⁴ learned the theory of anything. For instance, any eminent⁵ botanist⁶ at a Soirée of the Royal Society could tell you, of course, that other edible⁷ fungi⁸ exist, as well as mushrooms and truffles. But long before he was a botanist, still less an eminent botanist, he had begun, so to speak, on a basis of mushrooms and truffles. He felt, in a vague way, that these were really edible, that mushrooms were a moderate luxury, proper to the middle classes, while truffles were a much more expensive luxury, more suitable to the Smart Set. But the old English Naturalists⁹, of whom Isaac Walton was perhaps the first, and Humphrey Pump perhaps the last, had in many cases really begun at the other end, and found by experience (often most disastrous¹⁰ experience) that some fungi are wholesome¹¹ and some are not; but the wholesome ones are, on a whole, the majority. So a man like Pump was no more afraid of a fungus as such than he was of an animal as such. He no more started with the supposition that a grey or purple growth on a stone must be a poisonous growth than he started with the supposition that the dog who came to him out of the wood must be a mad dog. Most of them he knew; those he did not know he treated with rational caution, but to him, as a whole race, these weird-hued and one-legged goblins of the forests were creatures friendly to man.  
“You see,” he said to his friend the Captain, “eating vegetables isn’t half bad, so long as you know what vegetables there are and eat all of them that you can. But there are two ways where it goes wrong among the gentry¹². First, they’ve never had to eat a carrot or a potato because it was all there was in the house; so they’ve never learnt how to be really hungry for carrots, as that donkey might be. They only know the vegetables that are meant to help the meat. They know you take duck and peas; and when they turn vegetarian¹³ they can only think of the peas without the duck. They know you take lobster¹⁴ in a salad; and when they turn vegetarian they can only think of the salad without the lobster. But the other reason is worse. There’s plenty of good people even round here, and still more in the north, who get meat very seldom. But then, when they do get it, they gobble it up like good ’uns. But the trouble with the gentry is different. The trouble is, the same sort of gentry that don’t want to eat meat don’t really want to eat anything. The man called a Vegetarian who goes to Ivywood House is generally like a cow trying to live on a blade of grass a day. You and I, Captain, have pretty well been vegetarians¹⁵ for some time, so as not to break into the cheese, and we haven’t found it so difficult, because we eat as much as we can.”
 
“It’s not so difficult as being teetotallers,” answered Dalroy, “so as not to break into the cask. But I’ll never deny that I feel the better for that, too, on the whole. But only because I could leave off being one whenever I chose. And, now I come to think of it,” he cried, with one of his odd returns of animal energy, “if I’m to be a vegetarian why shouldn’t I drink? Why shouldn’t I have a purely¹⁶ vegetarian drink? Why shouldn’t I take vegetables in their highest form, so to speak? The modest vegetarians ought obviously to stick to wine or beer, plain vegetarian drinks, instead of filling their goblets¹⁷ with the blood of bulls and elephants, as all conventional meat-eaters do, I suppose. What is the matter?”
 
“Nothing,” answered Pump. “I was looking out for somebody who generally turns up about this time. But I think I’m fast.”
 
“I should never have thought so from the look of you,” answered the Captain, “but what I’m saying is that the drinking of decent fermented¹⁸ liquor is just simply the triumph of vegetarianism¹⁹. Why, it’s an inspiring idea! I could write a sort of song about it. As, for instance—
 
“You will find me drinking rum
Like a sailor in a slum,
You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian;
You will find me drinking gin
In the lowest kind of inn,
Because I am a rigid²⁰ Vegetarian.”
Why, it’s a vista²¹ of verbal felicity and spiritual edification! It has I don’t know how many hundred aspects! Let’s see; how could the second verse go? Something like—
 
“So I cleared the inn of wine,
And I tried to climb the Sign;
And I tried to hail the constable²² as ‘Marion’;
But he said I couldn’t speak,
And he bowled me to the Beak²³,
Because I was a Happy Vegetarian.”
I really think something instructive to the human race may come out of all this.... Hullo! Is that what you were looking for?”
 
The quadruped Quoodle came in out of the woods a whole minute later than the usual time and took his seat beside Humphrey’s left foot with a preoccupied²⁴ air.
 
“Good old boy,” said the Captain. “You seem to have taken quite a fancy to us. I doubt, Hump, if he’s properly looked after up at the house. I particularly don’t want to talk against Ivywood, Hump. I don’t want his soul to be able in all eternity²⁵ to accuse my soul of a mean detraction²⁶. I want to be fair to him, because I hate him like hell, and he has taken from me all for which I lived. But I don’t think, with all this in my mind, I don’t think I say anything beyond what he would own himself (for his brain is clear) when I say that he could never understand an animal. And so he could never understand the animal side of a man. He doesn’t know to this day, Hump, that your sight and hearing are sixty times quicker than his. He doesn’t know that I have a better circulation. That explains the extraordinary people he picks up and acts with; he never looks at them as you and I look at that dog. There was a fellow calling himself Gluck who was (mainly by Ivywood’s influence, I believe) his colleague on the Turkish Conferences, being supposed to represent Germany. My dear Hump, he was a man that a great gentleman like Ivywood ought not to have touched with a barge-pole. It’s not the race he was—if it was one race—it’s the Sort he was. A coarse, common, Levantine nark and eavesdropper—but you mustn’t lose your temper, Hump. I implore²⁷ you, Hump, to control this tendency to lose your temper when talking at any length about such people. Have recourse, Hump, to that consoling system of versification which I have already explained to you.
 
“Oh I knew a Doctor Gluck,
And his nose it had a hook,
And his attitudes were anything but Aryan;
So I gave him all the pork
That I had, upon a fork;
Because I am myself a Vegetarian.”
“If you are,” said Humphrey Pump, “you’d better come and eat some vegetables. The White Hat can be eaten cold—or raw, for that matter. But Bloodspots wants some cooking.”
 
“You are right, Hump,” said Dalroy, seating himself with every appearance of speechless greed. “I will be silent. As the poet says—
 
“I am silent in the Club,
I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien;
For I stuff away for life,
Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am at heart a Vegetarian.”
He fell to his food with great gusto, dispatched a good deal of it in a very short time, threw a glance of gloomy envy at the cask, and then sprang to his feet again. He caught up the inn-sign from where it leant against the Pantomime Cottage, and planted it like a pike in the ground beside him. Then he began to sing again, in an even louder voice than before.
 
“O, Lord Ivywood may lop,
And his privilege is sylvan²⁸ and riparian;
And is also free to top,
But——.”
“Do you know,” said Hump, also finishing his lunch, “that I’m rather tired of that particular tune²⁹?”
 
“Tired, is it?” said the indignant Irishman, “then I’ll sing you a longer song, to an even worse tune, about more and more vegetarians, and you shall see me dance as well; and I will dance till you burst into tears and offer me the half of your kingdom; and I shall ask for Mr. Leveson’s head on the frying-pan. For this, let me tell you, is a song of oriental origin, celebrating the caprices of an ancient Babylonian Sultan and should be performed in palaces of ivory with palm trees and a bulbul accompaniment.”
 
And he began to bellow³⁰ another and older lyric³¹ of his own on vegetarianism.
 
“Nebuchadnezzar, the King of the Jews,
Suffered from new and original views,
He crawled on his hands and knees it’s said,
With grass in his mouth and a crown on his head,
With a wowtyiddly, etc.
“Those in traditional paths that trod,
Thought the thing was a curse from God;
But a Pioneer men always abuse,
Like Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews.”
Dalroy, as he sang this, actually began to dance about like a ballet girl, an enormous and ridiculous figure in the sunlight, waving the wooden sign around his head. Quoodle opened his eyes and pricked³² up his ears and seemed much interested in these extraordinary evolutions. Suddenly, with one of those startling changes that will transfigure the most sedentary dogs, Quoodle decided³³ that the dance was a game, and began to bark and bound round the performer, sometimes leaping so far into the air as almost to threaten the man’s throat. But, though the sailor naturally knew less about dogs than the countryman, he knew enough about them (as about many other things) not to be afraid, and the voice he sang with might have drowned the baying of a pack.
 
“Black Lord Foulon the Frenchmen slew³⁴,
Thought it a Futurist thing to do;
He offered them grass instead of bread,
So they stuffed him with grass when they cut off his head.
With a wowtyiddly, etc.
“For the pride of his soul he perished then,
But of course it is always of Pride that men
A Man in Advance of his Age accuse
Like Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews.
“Simeon Scudder of Styx, in Maine,
Thought of the thing and was at it again;
He gave good grass and water in pails
To a thousand Irishmen hammering rails,
With a wowtyiddly, etc.
“Appetites differ, and tied to a stake,
He was tarred and feathered for Conscience Sake;
But stoning the prophets is ancient news,
Like Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews.”
In an abandon, unusual even for him, he had danced his way down through the thistles into the jungle of weeds risen round the sunken Chapel³⁵. And the dog, now fully³⁶ convinced that it was not only a game but an expedition, perhaps a hunting expedition, ran barking in front of him, along the path that his own dog’s paws had already burst through the tangle³⁷. Before Patrick Dalroy well knew what he was doing, or even remembered that he still carried the ridiculous signboard in his hand, he found himself outside the open porch of a sort of narrow tower at the angle of a building which, to the best of his recollection, he had never seen before. Quoodle instantly ran up four or five steps in t............