How to tell Glistening inkcap from Funeral bell

Young caps are egg-shaped, 1 to 2.5 cm, then bell-shaped and convex, 2 to 4 cm across, occasionally 5 cm; with age the margin splits and turns up. The colour is honey brown, ochre or russet, darker in the centre and paler at the edge, greying with age. The surface is grooved almost to the centre.

Young caps are covered in tiny white, glittering grains like sugar or mica. Rain and dew wash them off, so older caps are bare.

The cap is small, 1.5 to 5 cm across and rarely up to 7 cm. It starts convex with an inrolled margin, then opens out almost flat, sometimes with a small bump in the middle.

The colour is honey yellow, ochre or tawny brown. The surface is smooth and slightly sticky in wet weather, and the margin is translucent, so you can see the lines of the gills through it. The cap is hygrophanous: it turns noticeably paler as it dries and is often two-toned. Sheathed woodtuft changes in exactly the same way, so cap colour won't separate them.

The gills are crowded, attached or free, white at first, then grey-brown, purplish brown and black. With age they blacken and partly dissolve, though less completely than in the common inkcap.

The spore print is black-brown to black.

The gills are attached to the stem or run slightly down it, and they are crowded and narrow. Pale ochre or yellowish at first, they turn rusty brown as the spores ripen.

The spore print is rusty brown. That rules out honey fungus and velvet shank (white prints) and sulphur tuft and conifer tuft (purple-brown to almost black). It won't rule out sheathed woodtuft, though, whose print is the same colour. The spores are warty, roughly 8–10 × 5–6 µm, clearly larger and rougher than the smooth spores of woodtuft, but that only shows under a microscope.

The stem is 3 to 8 cm tall, occasionally 10 cm, and 2 to 5 mm thick, white, silky, hollow and brittle, ochre or brownish at the base. Young stems show a fine down under a hand lens. There's no ring.

The stem is slender, 2 to 7 cm long and 3 to 8 mm thick, even, and hollow with age. It is pale at the top and darkens to brown or reddish brown towards the base. Below the ring it is covered in pale silvery fibres running lengthwise, without the shaggy scales of sheathed woodtuft. White felty mycelium is visible at the base.

The ring is thin, membranous, whitish to yellowish, and soon turns brown from the spores. It's fragile: often all that's left is a brown band on the stem, and old specimens can lose it entirely. So a missing ring doesn't mean it isn't a funeral bell. There is no volva at the base.

The flesh is very thin, brittle and whitish.

The flesh is thin, yellowish to watery brown and darker in the stem. It doesn't change colour when cut.

The smell isn't distinctive.

The smell is often mealy, like fresh flour, especially when the mushroom is crushed. It can also be very faint, so field guides don't treat smell as a reliable feature, and it won't tell a funeral bell from a woodtuft.