hat a single, tiny seed of the
tomato--a seed that looked scarcely larger than the head of a pin--should
have locked up in its heart such things as roots and leaves, and that,
after a while, great, big red tomatoes would hang down from the green
tomato vine--all from one little seed.

"It's wonderful--just like when the man in the show took a rabbit, a
guinea pig and a lot of silk ribbon out of Daddy's hat," spoke Hal.

"It is more wonderful," said Mr. Blake. "For the man in the show put the
things in my hat by a trick, when you were not looking, and only took them
out again to make you think they were there all the while. But roots,
seeds and tomatoes are not exactly inside the seed all the while. The
germ--the life--is there, and after it starts to grow the leaves, roots
and tomatoes are made from the soil, the air, the water and the sunshine."

"Are there tomatoes in the air?" asked Mab.

"Well, if it were not for the things in the air, the oxygen, the nitrogen
and other gases, about which you are too young to understand now, we could
not live grow, and neither could plants. Plants also have to have water to
drink, as we do, and food to eat, only they eat the things found in the
dirt, and we can not do that. At least not until they are changed into
fruits, grain or vegetables."

Hal and Mab never tired looking at the tomato plants growing in the box in
the house. Each day the tiny green leaves became larger and raised
themselves higher and higher from the earth.

"Soon they will be large enough to transplant, or set out in the garden,"
said Daddy Blake.

Two or three days after their father had told Hal and Mab why seeds grow,
the children, coming home from school, saw something strange in their
garden.

There was a man, with a team of horses and the brown earth was being torn
up by a big shiny thing which the horses were pulling as the man drove
them.

"Oh, what's that in our garden?" cried Hal to Uncle Pennywait.

"It's a man plowing," said Hal's Uncle.

"But won't he spoil the garden?" Mab wanted to know.

"He's just starting to make it," Uncle Pennywait answered. "Didn't Daddy
Blake tell you that the ground must be plowed or chopped up, and then
finely pulverized or smoothed, so the seeds would grow better?"

"Oh, yet, so he did," Hal said.

"Well, this is the first start of making a garden," went on Uncle
Pennywait. "The ground must be plowed or spaded. Spading is all right for
a small garden, b