Then, the day when Daddy Blake came back from his business trip, Hal, looking at the tomato box, cried: 

“Oh, Mab!  Look!  There are a lot of little green leaves here.”

“Yes, the tomatoes are beginning to grow,” said Daddy Blake, when he had taken a look.

“What makes the seeds grow and green leaves come out?” asked Hal.

“Well, as I said, Mother Nature does it and no one can tell how,” said Daddy Blake.  “But somewhere inside this tiny little thing,” and he held out in his hand a tomato seed, “somewhere there is hidden a spark of life.  What it looks like we can not say.  It is deep in the heart of the seed.”

“Do seeds have hearts?” asked Mab.

“Well, no, not exactly,” her father answered.  “But we speak of the middle of a tree as it’s heart and I suppose the middle of a seed, where its life is, is its heart.  So this seed is really alive, though it doesn’t seem so.”

“It looks like a little yellow stone—­the kind that comes in sand,” spoke Hal.

“And yet it is alive,” said his father.  “It can not move about now, though when it is planted it begins to grow and it can move.  It can push its leaves up from under the earth.  Just now it is asleep, and has no life that we can see.”

“What will bring it to life and make it wake up?” asked Hal.

“The warm dirt in which it is planted, the sunlight, the air and the water you sprinkle on it,” said Mr. Blake.  “If you kept this seed cold and dry it might sleep for many many years, but as soon as you put it under the warm, wet soil, and set the box of dirt where the sun can shine on it, 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.