“I hope one of us wins it, Mab.  If I win I’ll give you half.”

“And I’ll give you half if I win, ’cause you helped me hoe my beans one day when there was so many weeds in ’em.”

Daddy Blake had put the ten dollar gold piece in a little box on the dining room mantle, and every day Hal or Mab looked to make sure the prize was there.

“What you doin’ Uncle Pennywait?” asked Mab as she and her brother went over to the vacant lot next door, where part of the Blake garden had been planted.

“I’m taking the eyes out of the potatoes,” answered Uncle Pennywait.

“Eyes out of potatoes!” cried Hal.  “I didn’t know they had any.”

“Of course they have!” laughed his uncle.  “Else how could they see to get out of their brown skin-jackets when they want to go swimming in the kettle of hot water?”

“Oh, he’s only fooling us; isn’t he Aunt Lolly?” asked Hal.  His aunt was hoeing some weeds away from between the hills of cucumbers she had planted, for she was going to raise some of them, as well as pumpkins, which last had been planted in between the rows of Hal’s corn.

“Well, Uncle Pennywait may be fooling you a little,” said Aunt Lolly, “but I did see him cutting some eyes from the potatoes.”

Hal and Mab looked at one another.  They did not know what to think now.  It was seldom that both Aunt Lolly and Uncle Pennywait joked at the same time.

“Come over here and I’ll show you,” called Uncle Pennywait when he had laughed at the funny looks on the faces of the two children.  “See,” he went on, “these are the ‘eyes’ of the potato, though the right name, of course, is seeds.”

He pointed to the little spots you may see on any potato you pick up, unless it is one to small to have them.  The spots are near the ends and in the middle, and they look like little dimples.  Some of them may look very much like eyes, and that is what most gardeners and farmers call them, but they are really the potato’s seeds.

Mab and Hal watched what Uncle Pennywait was doing.  He had a basket in which were some large potatoes and these he was cutting into chunks, letting them fall into another basket.  In each chunk their uncle cut the children noticed several “eyes.”

“What are you doing?” asked Hal.

“I am getting ready to plant a second crop of potatoes,” said Uncle Pennywait.  “The first ones I planted in my garden were early ones.  Soon we will be eating them on the table.  They are not the kind that will keep well all winter, and I am planting that kind now.  I am going to win the ten dollar prize by raising a bigger crop of potatoes than you can raise of corn or beans, little ones,” and he smiled at Hal and Mab.

Then he went on cutting the eyes out of the potatoes, while the children watched him.  They saw that each potato chunk had in it two or three of the queer dimple-spots.

“A potato is not like other things that grow in the garden,” said Uncle Pennywait.  “It does not have its seeds separate from it, as beans have theirs in a pod, or as corn has its kernels or seeds on a cob, or a pumpkin or apple has seeds inside it.  A potato’s seeds are part of itself, buried in the white part that we cook for the table, and each potato has in it many seeds or eyes.