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Updated: May 31, 2025
When I last saw him, a day or two before his death in 1891, he begged that I would do him one final act of friendship by supplying him with a winding sheet, that he might go decently to his grave under the sods and the spear-grass, bearing thither a token of the love I bore him. It was a good shroud of fine white calico bought in the bazaar, and it cost more than a dollar.
Not having any with me, and believing I knew what spear-grass was, I refrained from borrowing, so that on landing at Nantou with my dog and gun, it was in an ordinary shooting suit and worsted stockings. Inquiries of natives as to the whereabouts of these birds soon led me up the mountain-side to a rocky plateau, which looked extremely likely, and where I even saw traces of them.
The whole of the different fields were covered with either the stalks of weeds, corn-stalks, or what is called sedge something like spear-grass upon the poor limestone in England; and the steward told me nothing would eat it, which is true.
Sometimes he would cross a deep gully on a plank not wider than the hand; at another time he ploughed his way through beds of spear-grass, where at a few feet to the right or left he might have been sucked down into a morass.
Spear-grass one often hears of but seldom sees, and until making acquaintance with the real thing I had always imagined that the barbed grass seeds, which are such a harmful worry to dogs, were practically identical with it. Not at all.
Then he suddenly felt his letter, opened and read it again. The day came for the image from the temple to be drawn round the holy town in its chariot. The Queen said to the King, "Let us go and attend the festival." Only one man out of the whole household did not join in the pilgrimage. His work was to collect stalks of spear-grass to make brooms for the King's house.
I have very little to record, save that I was disappointed at not finding the wild plants more numerous and more beautiful; they are few, and decidedly ugly. There is one beast of a plant they call spear-grass, or spaniard, which I will tell you more about at another time.
Before leaving Ichang for a trip to the Yangtse gorges I expressed my intention of trying to get some of those beautiful Reeves pheasants, having tails several feet in length, which are indigenous to that locality, but was warned that it would be necessary to take long leggings as a protection against spear-grass.
It is sometimes called spear-grass, and grows to about the size of a mole-hill, all over the back country everywhere, as thick as mole-hills in a very mole-hilly field at home.
It was a ridiculous position, and tired, sore from the spear-grass, and annoyed as I was, I could not refrain from a hearty laugh at our predicament before attempting to extricate my unhappy quadruped; this I succeeded in doing with some difficulty, and found him, with the exception of some few scratches, quite unhurt.
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