s their father had told them to do.

Then, the day when Daddy Blake came back from his business trip, Hal,
looking at the tomato box, cried:

"Oh, Mab! Look! There are a lot of little green leaves here."

"Yes, the tomatoes are beginning to grow," said Daddy Blake, when he had
taken a look.

"What makes the seeds grow and green leaves come out?" asked Hal.

"Well, as I said, Mother Nature does it and no one can tell how," said
Daddy Blake. "But somewhere inside this tiny little thing," and he held
out in his hand a tomato seed, "somewhere there is hidden a spark of life.
What it looks like we can not say. It is deep in the heart of the seed."

"Do seeds have hearts?" asked Mab.

"Well, no, not exactly," her father answered. "But we speak of the middle
of a tree as it's heart and I suppose the middle of a seed, where its life
is, is its heart. So this seed is really alive, though it doesn't seem
so."

"It looks like a little yellow stone--the kind that comes in sand," spoke
Hal.

"And yet it is alive," said his father. "It can not move about now, though
when it is planted it begins to grow and it can move. It can push its
leaves up from under the earth. Just now it is asleep, and has no life
that we can see."

"What will bring it to life and make it wake up?" asked Hal.

"The warm dirt in which it is planted, the sunlight, the air and the water
you sprinkle on it," said Mr. Blake. "If you kept this seed cold and dry
it might sleep for many many years, but as soon as you put it under the
warm, wet soil, and set the box of dirt where the sun can shine on it,
then the seed begins to awaken. Something inside it--a germ some call
it--begins to swell. It gets larger--the seed is germinating. The hard
outside shell, or husk, gets soft and breaks open. The heart inside swells
larger and larger. A tiny root appears and begins to dig its way down
deeper in the ground to find things to eat. At the same time another part
of the seed turns into leaves and these grow up. It is the green leaves
you see first, peeping up above the ground, that tell you the seed has
germinated and is growing."

"Isn't it funny!" said Hal. "One part of the seed grows down and the other
part grows up."

"Yes," said Daddy Blake. "That's the way seeds grow. Each day you will see
these little tomato plants growing more and more, and, as soon as they are
large enough, we will set them out in the garden."

Hal and Mab thought it was wonderful t