“Did any of you notice the bean I’ve been sprouting in my room?” asked Helen.

“I’ll get it, I’ll get it!” shouted Dicky.

“Trust Dicky not to let anything escape his notice!” laughed his big sister.

Dicky returned in a minute or two carrying very carefully a shallow earthenware dish from which some thick yellow-green tips were sprouting.

“I soaked some peas and beans last week,” explained Helen, “and when they were tender I planted them.  You see they’re poking up their heads now.”

[Illustration:  Bean Plant]

“They don’t look like real leaves,” commented Ethel Blue.

“This first pair is really the two halves of the bean.  They hold the food for the little plant.  They’re so fat and pudgy that they never do look like real leaves.  In other plants where there isn’t so much food they become quite like their later brothers.”

“Isn’t it queer that whatever makes the plant grow knows enough to send the leaves up and the roots down,” said Dorothy thoughtfully.

“That’s the way the life principle works,” agreed Helen.  “This other little plant is a pea and I want you to see if you notice any difference between it and the bean.”

She pulled up the wee growth very delicately and they all bent over it as it lay in her hand.

“It hathn’t got fat leaveth,” cried Dicky.

[Illustration:  The Pea Plant]

“Good for Dicky,” exclaimed Helen.  “He has beaten you girls.  You see the food in the pea is packed so tight that the pea gets discouraged about trying to send up those first leaves and gives it up as a bad job.  They stay underground and do their feeding from there.”

“A sort of cold storage arrangement,” smiled Ethel Brown.

“After these peas are a little taller you’d find if you pulled them up that the supply of food had all been used up.  There will be nothing down there but a husk.”

“What happens when this bean plant uses up all its food?”

“There’s nothing left but a sort of skin that drops off.  You can see how it works with the bean because that is done above the ground.”

“Won’t it hurt those plants to pull them up this way?”

“It will set them back, but I planted a good many so as to be able to pull them up at different ages and see how they looked.”

“You pulled that out so gently I don’t believe it will be hurt much.”

“Probably it will take a day or two for it to catch up with its neighbors.  It will have to settle its roots again, you see.”

“What are you doing this planting for?” asked Dorothy.

“For the class at school.  We get all the different kinds of seeds we can—­the ones that are large enough to examine easily with only a magnifying glass like this one.  Some we cut open and examine carefully inside to see how the new leaves are to be fed, and then we plant others and watch them grow.”