s the little
round lettuce-seeds. They looked like tiny beads; it did not seem
possible that green lettuce leaves could come from those. But they
surely would.

Mother and father and Margery were all late to supper that evening.
But they were all so happy that it did not matter. The last thing
Margery thought of, as she went to sleep at night, was the dear, smooth
little garden, with its funny foot-path, and with the little sticks
standing at the end of the rows, labeled "lettuce," "beets,"
"helianthus," and so on.

"I have a garden! I have a garden!" thought Margery, and then she went
off to dreamland.

THE LITTLE COTYLEDONS

This is another story about Margery's garden.

The next morning after the garden was planted, Margery was up and out
at six o'clock. She could not wait to look at her garden. To be sure,
she knew that the seeds could not sprout in a single night, but she had
a feeling that SOMETHING might happen while she was not looking. The
garden was just as smooth and brown as the night before, and no little
seeds were in sight.

But a very few mornings after that, when Margery went out, there was a
funny little crack opening up through the earth, the whole length of
the patch. Quickly she knelt down in the footpath, to see. Yes! Tiny
green leaves, a whole row of them, were pushing their way through the
crust! Margery knew what she had put there: it was the radish-row;
these must be radish leaves. She examined them very closely, so that
she might know a radish next time. The little leaves, no bigger than
half your little-finger nail, grew in twos,--two on each tiny stem;
they were almost round.

Margery flew back to her mother, to say that the first seeds were up.
And her mother, nearly as excited as Margery, came to look at the
little crack.

Each day, after that, the row of radishes grew, till, in a week, it
stood as high as your finger, green and sturdy. But about the third
day, while Margery was stooping over the radishes, she saw something
very, very small and green, peeping above ground, where the lettuce was
planted. Could it be weeds? No, for on looking very closely she saw
that the wee leaves faintly marked a regular row. They did not make a
crack, like the radishes; they seemed too small and too far apart to
push the earth up like that. Margery leaned down and looked with all
her eyes at the baby plants. The tiny leaves grew two on a stem, and
were almost round. The m