"You can have three or four plants in one pot--perhaps that will do. Then you can put nasturtiums in the other little pot. They are easy to grow, and very beautiful." "Yes," said Prue, "I never saw anything so _lovely_ as your nasturtiums by the house, last year." The Chief Gardener looked at the sketch and tapped it with his pencil. [Illustration: THE BEANS AT THE END OF TWO WEEKS] "Of course," he said, "your garden may not look just as I have it here. I don't draw very well, but I can make things about the right sizes to fit the windows, and that isn't so hard to do with a pencil as it is with the plants themselves. Plants, like children, don't always grow just as their friends want them to, and they are not always well behaved. You see--" "But won't my bean vines and corn grow up like that?" asked Davy. "And won't my morning-glories have flowers on them?" asked Prue. "I hope they will, and we will try to coax them. But you see things may happen. Sometimes it comes a very cold night when the fires get low, and then plants are likely to chill, or perhaps freeze and die. We can only try to be very careful." "How long will it take them to grow?" asked Davy. "That is not easy to say. When everything is just right, some seeds start very soon. I have known radishes to pop up within three days, when the weather was warm and damp. Corn will sprout in about a week, in warm weather. Sweet-pease take a good deal longer, though we can hurry them a little by soaking them in warm water before we plant them. But we will talk about all that later. First, let's see about the pots and earth, and the seeds." III MANY SEEDS ARE GIVEN WINGS THE Chief Gardener took Davy and Prue down in the basement, where in one corner he kept his flower-pots and garden-tools. "I'm going to use the hoe," said Davy, reaching for the long handle. "I'll have the rake for my garden," said Prue. The Chief Gardener smiled. "I don't think we'll need either for this gardening. A small weeder or an old kitchen-knife will be about the largest tool you can use." Then he picked out some pots, set them side by side on a table, and measured them to see how long a row they made. Then he changed them and measured again. "There," he said, "those will just fit one window. Now, another set for the other window and we are ready for the soil." "Where will you get dirt? Everything is frozen hard," said Davy. The Chief Gardener took up a spading-fork from among the tools. "We'll get our hats and coats, first," he said, "then we'll see what we can find."