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ONE evening while Mr. Mistletoe was pulling up plantain-weeds. . . .
But before we go on I had better tell you a few details about Mr. Mistletoe's adventures as a grass-grower.
He was always happy when he was mowing the lawn—though lawn is certainly too smooth a word for such a bumpy arrangement of ground. There is something very soothing in the whirr of the twirling blades, if it is not broken too often by the hard shock of a stick or a pebble or one of Donny's old bones. Keeping the lawnmower straight, and enjoying the smell of cut grass, and feeling your own strong earth solid under your feet, is a healthy pleasure.
But though Mr. Mistletoe was very happy mowing the grass, he looked serious. Perhaps he wag thinking? Certainly there was plenty to think about. I wonder what there was about his ground that made it so attractive to moles. Every time he thought he had got the front grass-plot in pretty good order, there appeared a new lot of their wrinkly little subways. Then these soft tunnels had to be all carefully trodden down or else flattened out with the heavy roller. Worst of all was when Donny and Fritz would decide to give some help in the mole problem. Then, when Mr. Mistletoe came back in the evening, he would find a ragged zigzag furrow, ten or fifteen feet long, dug up one of the terraces; or a hole big enough to bury a neighbour's child in. These excavations were worse to repair than all the tunnels a whole family of moles could make in a month.
Another thing Mr. Mistletoe used to think about, as he went solemnly to and fro with the lawnmower (stopping now and then to light his pipe and wipe his forehead) was the idea of starting a Nassau County Weed Show. In a Flower Show he would have no chance at all; but in a well-conducted Weed Show he ought to get a prize. His plantain-weeds were remarkable, both in number and size. And in a good Weed Show there should also be prizes for the greatest number of croquet hoops lost in one season, or balls disappeared among rhododendron bushes, or velocipedes left out over night. In such competitions, he believed, the family would rank high.
But the plantain-weeds were his special concern. On warm evenings he often spent an hour or so grubbing them up. Sometimes it seemed as though the lawn was really more plantain than grass. But it is quite good fun pulling them up, because you are never sure whether the roots will come or not. If you are careful to get hold of all the leaves, and give a little twist, the chances are that the roots will come too. The game is to keep score, and count how many roots come and how many don't.
What bothered Mr. Mistletoe, in these adventures, was that anything so plentiful as those weeds should be so useless. For he liked to imagine that almost everything is useful in one way or another if you understand about it. It always gave him great pain to throw anything away: he carefully preserved bits of string, heads of broken dolls, small pencils, buttons, corks, rusty nails. He rarely put these odds and ends to any purpose, but it made him happy to have saved them.
One evening, then, as I started to say at the beginning, Mr. Mistletoe was cheerfully pulling up plantain-weeds and putting them into a basket. When the basket was full he carried it into the woods and dumped it, and doing so he had to pass by the rabbit run. As he did so, he always said "Well, bunny bunny bunny," which was not an important thing to say but showed a friendly spirit. He and the rabbits led very different lives, and perhaps they did not really have very much in common, but at any rate they were on good terms. So he was shocked, passing their wire netting, to see that their eyes were full of tears.
They were white rabbits, with beautiful red eyes: Even in their cheerfullest moods there seems something a little wistful about eyes of that colour: they look as though they had been reddened by long and inconsolable weeping. So when you take eyes that are naturally red, and fill them with real tears, the effect is very sad. Mr. Mistletoe was painfully startled and stopped by the netting to wonder.
If he had not been rather a stupid man he would have guessed long before. The rabbits had been trying all summer to tell him, but he could not understand their language. It was gradually breaking their hearts to see him, day after day, pulling up and throwing away the beautiful delicious plantain-weeds they love so much. Among the many things that Mr. Mistletoe did not know was the interesting fact that juicy green plantain is one of a rabbit's most favourite foods. And to remain helpless in their enclosure and watch all that plantain being wasted was more than they could bear.
When he stood there, holding the basket of weeds and wondering, the rabbits became greatly excited. Their ruby eyes glistened with trouble, their tall pink ears quivered, they stood up poking through the wire with noses that twitched.
"Good gracious," said Mr. Mistletoe. "They seem terribly upset about something. Can it be that they want some of the plantain? It might be very bad for them."
It seems queer that a man could be so ignorant. Do dogs like bones? Do horses like apples? Do Chinamen like rice? Do girls like fudge? That is how rabbits feel about plantain.
The behaviour of the rabbits was so emphatic, their eyes were so eloquently wet, that Mr. Mistletoe thought he might give them just one plantain and see what happened. When he began pushing it through the hole in the netting they almost tore it from his hands. They fell upon it like sailors on a glass of grog after a long, long voyage. There was a violent nibbling and crunching and in half a minute that green weed had entirely disappeared, even the little cluster of roots.
Mr. Mistletoe watched anxiously. He had a sort of idea that perhaps Binny and Bunny would suddenly fall dead. But they looked stronger and bigger than ever, their noses trembled with healthy vibrations, the tears had vanished from their eyes. They looked at him in a way he could not possibly misunderstand.
Good heavens, he said to himself, and gave them the whole basket.
Late that night Mr. Mistletoe was waked by a queer soft cheerful sound coming from the back yard. The rabbits were singing.
Slowly and quietly Mr. Mistletoe thought about this matter. He noticed, after that, that every time he began to pull up plantain-weeds the rabbits were watching him closely. Then a great idea came to him. He hunted about in the attic until he found the old baby-pen that had been used by the children long ago. He carried it outdoors and put it over the richest and thickest patch of plantain on the lawn. Then he put Binny and Bunny in the pen. There was a merry sound of crisp eating, and that was the end of that patch. As they ate, the rabbits' active paws patted down the earth smoothly and neatly so that all was left tidy. After an hour's time he shifted the pen to another place and they began afresh.
So that is how the great institution of Plantain Hour was started. Every summer evening the rabbits have their outing in the pen, and move round from one part of the garden to another. That is why Mr. Mistletoe's lawn is now so beautiful, and why the rabbits are the most buxom in the Roslyn Estates. Just look at them!
And how about the mole-subways that Donny and Fritz dug open? Well, Mr. Mistletoe had learned a great secret. It is this, that grass will always grow excellently in places where it isn't wanted or expected. The stone gutters along his driveway, and the blue gravel of the drive itself, were thick with fine healthy clumps of grass. So he invented the trick of pulling up these little clumps and transplanting them into the ragged holes where the dogs had been at work.
A grass-plot could get the better of Mr. Mistletoe for a while, but it couldn't fool him permanently. In some ways he was quite an ingenious man.
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