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 at any moment.  The garden was just as smooth and brown as the night before, and no little seedlings were in sight.

But a very few mornings after that, when Margery went out, she saw a funny little crack opening up through the earth, the whole length of the patch.  Quickly she knelt down on 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 more she looked at them the more it seemed to Margery that they looked exactly as the radish looked when it first came up.  “Do you suppose,” Margery said to herself, “that lettuce and radish look alike while they are growing?  They don’t look alike when they are on the table!”

Day by day the lettuce grew, and soon the little round leaves were easier to examine; they certainly were very much like radish leaves.

Then, one morning, while she was searching for signs of other seeds, Margery discovered the beets.  In irregular patches on the row, hints of green were coming.  The next day and the next they grew, until the beet leaves were big enough to see.

Margery looked.  Then she looked again.  Then she wrinkled her forehead.  “Can we have made a mistake?” she thought.  “Do you suppose we can have planted all radishes?”

For those little beet leaves were almost round, and they grew two on a stem, precisely like the lettuce and the radish; except for the size, all three rows looked alike.

It was too much for Margery.  She ran to the house and found her father.  Her little face was so anxious that he thought something unpleasant had happened.  “Papa,” she said, all out of breath, “do you think we could have made a mistake about my garden?  Do you think we could have put radishes in all the rows?”