Explore "A Giant Puff-Ball" by Frank R. Stockton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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!