garden, and in some places there were growing tiny
little pickles--or they would be pickles, when put in salt, vinegar and
spices.

"Are you really going to make a cucumber grow in a bottle?" asked Mab as
she saw her aunt, with a bottle in her hand, stooping over one of the
vines.

"I really am," was the answer. "It is only a little trick, though, and
really does no good. But I thought you children would like to see it."

"How are you going to do it?" asked Hal.

"You see this little cucumber, or pickle," spoke Aunt Lolly, and she
showed one to Hal and Mab. "Well now I'm going to slip it inside this
bottle, but not pull the pickle from the vine. If I did that the cucumber
would stop growing and die."

She had a bottle with a neck large enough so the pickle would go in it.
The bottle was an odd shape.

"The pickle will grow large and completely fill the bottle," went on Aunt
Lolly. "It will grow because it is not broken off the stem, and the
bottle, being glass, will let in the sunshine. The neck is also large
enough so air can get in, for without air, sunlight and the food it gets
through the stem the pickle would not live.

"But as it grows it will swell and fill every part of the bottle and it
also will grow just to the shape of the bottle, so that in the Fall, when
it can't grow any more, because of the strong glass, I can break the
bottle and I will have a pickle shaped just like it, curves, queer twists
and everything else."

"Oh, how funny!" cried Hal "I wonder if I could grow an ear of corn in a
bottle?"

"No," answered his aunt. "An ear of corn has to grow inside the husk, and
you could not, very well, put a bottle over that."

"Could I over one of my beans?" asked Mab.

"Well, you might, but it would have to be a very long and thin bottle, for
a bean is that shape when it has grown as large as it will ever get. So I
don't believe I'd try it, if I were you. Ill let you each have one of my
pickles to grow inside a bottle."

Hal and Mab thought this would be fun so they found other bottles with
which to do the funny trick of making cucumbers grow inside the glass.

"I wish Daddy would give a prize for the funniest shaped cucumber," said
Mab, when she had fixed her bottle with a pickle inside it.

"Maybe he will," spoke her brother. "We'll ask him."

But when Daddy Blake came home that evening he had a package in his arms,
and the children were so interested about what might be in it that they
f