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 that 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