t?" asked Hal.

"Because a potato that is cut, pierced or bruised badly will not keep as
well as one that is sound and good. It rots more quickly, and one rotten
potato in a bin of good ones will cause many others to spoil, just as one
rotten apple in a barrel of sound ones will spoil a great many. So be
careful when you dig your potatoes."

Hal and Mab watched Daddy Blake, and then he let them pull a vine and dig
in the hill after the brown tubers. Out they came tumbling and rolling, as
if glad to get into the light and sunshine. For they had been down under
the dark earth ever since the eyes were planted in the Spring, growing
from tiny potatoes Into large ones.

When Mab dug up her hill of potatoes, after she had picked up all there
were in it, her father saw her carefully looking among the clods of brown
soil.

"What have you lost, Mab?" he asked.

"I was looking for the eye pieces you planted when you made your potato
garden," she answered.

"Oh, they have turned into these many potatoes," laughed Mr. Blake. "That
is the magical trick Mother Nature does for us. We plant a piece of
potato, with 'eyes' in it, or we plant a seed, and up springs a plant on
the roots of which are more potatoes, or, if it is a bean, it turns into a
vine with many more beans on it. And the seed--that is the eye potato or
the bean--disappears completely, just as a magician on the stage pretends
to make your handkerchief disappear and change into a lemon. Mother Nature
is very wonderful."

Hal and Mab thought so too.

The Summer was passing away. The days that had been long and full of
sunshine until late in the evening were getting shorter. No longer was it
light at five o'clock in the morning, and the golden ball did not stay up
until after seven at night.

"The days are getting shorter and the nights longer," said Daddy Blake.
"That means Winter is not far off, though we still have Autumn or Fall
before us. And that will bring us the harvest days. We will soon begin to
harvest, or bring in our crops."

"And then will we know who gets the prize?" asked Hal.

"Yes," his father answered. "I'll have to award the ten dollar gold prize
then, but it will be some little time yet. Things are not all done
growing, though they have done their best. From now on we will not have to
worry so much about weeds, bugs and worms."

"Do they die, too, like the potato vines?" asked Mab.

"Yes, though many weeds will not be killed until a hard