342 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
sharp-pointed trowel, which was just what I wanted, 
and also saw there an important-looking weed- 
killing instrument and a can of poison, which I 
certainly did not want. I started taking up the 
plantains, working the trowel down to the end of 
the root so as to leave nothing of the tenacious 
cunning creature in the ground. By and by the 
man from the village came and saw the beginning 
of my work—my little harvest gathered from four 
or five square yards of lawn. He smiled, and 
when I asked him why he smiled, he said the lawn 
had been in that condition for the past ten years 
and nothing could be done to get rid of the plantains. 
He couldn’t say how many quarts of poison had 
been squirted into the roots, but they refused to 
die, and so on and so forth. On his next visit he 
found a huge heap of uprooted plantains in the 
middle of the lawn, left there for his special benefit, 
and not one growing plantain left on the lawn. 
“ Ah, yes,” he said—it was just what I had 
expected him to say—‘‘the fact is I’ve never had 
the time to do it properly. Always too busy with 
the rose garden, and plantains take a lot of time, 
you know. Certainly we did what we could with 
the weed - killer, but it seems it didn’t amount 
to much.” 
What it amounted to was this: here and there 
all about the lawn were round brown spots, the 
size of a crown-piece or larger, where the grass had 
perished and refused to grow again. These un- 
sightly spots marked the places where plantains 
