United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The stem of the plantain gradually decays, like the banana, when the fruit has ripened, after which the young shoots spring up from the roots once more to produce the abundant and nourishing food. It does not seem to have any special season, but is constantly in bloom and bearing.

I once saw a peculiar instance of this in an elephant that belonged to the police at Dhubri on the Brahmaputra. This animal had a large allowance of rice, therefore about three-quarters of a pound were placed within each tube of plantain stem. A lady offered the elephant, when being fed, a very small sweet biscuit, about an inch and a half in diameter.

Sagarika enters a plantain bower with a brush and pallet in order to paint a picture and soliloquises thus: "Be still, my foolish heart, nor idly throb for one so high above thy hopes. Why thus anxious to behold that form, one only view of which has inspired such painful agitation?

"Vidura said, 'He that is wise obtains tranquillity by subduing both grief and joy through means by which one may escape from grief and joy. All those things about which we are anxious, O bull among men, are ephemeral. The world is like a plantain tree, without enduring strength.

I felt very sleepy and odd. The soldiers said I was half-starved, and they gave me a plantain that they pulled by the road-side. I wanted them to give some to mamma too; but they made me no answer. I put mine into her hand, but she let it fall; and I cried because she would not take any notice. Then one of the soldiers bade me eat my plantain; and I thought I must do as I was bid.

After this, I had scarcely swallowed by breakfast before I received a summons from the king to meet him out shooting, with all the Wanguana armed, and my guns; and going towards the palace, found him with a large staff, pages and officers as well as women, in a plantain garden, looking eagerly out for birds, whilst his band was playing.

Projects of mighty settlement, and of sudden population, however successful in the end, are always expensive to mankind. If the plantain, the cocoa, or the palm, were sufficient to maintain an inhabitant, the race of men in the warmer climates might become as numerous as the trees of the forest.

The bread and honey, however, deposited on a plantain leaf, was offered and accepted in all due courtesy. The Lord Keeper, still retaining the place which he had occupied on the decayed trunk of a fallen tree, looked as if he wished to prolong the interview, but was at a loss how to introduce a suitable subject. "You have been long a resident on this property?" he said, after a pause.

The wound is then sprinkled with the pulvis rubeus and covered with a plantain or other leaf. On the ninth to the eleventh day, if the wound seems practically healed, the stitches are to be removed and the cure completed with simple dressings.

Here we passed by a long hedge of monthly roses, all in full flower. Over our heads waved the fine foliage of the banana and plantain. There was a long vineyard loaded with grapes, and the African negroes employed therein.