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 



