If you wish to find splendid color in a part of a plant, look at a water-melon. The skin is green marked with pale green, or white. Next, inside, is a rind of pale greenish white. Then comes a soft, juicy, crimson mass. In that are jet black seeds. Oh, where does all this color come from? Why is it always just in the right place? The melon rind does not take the black tint that belongs to the seeds. The skin does not put on the crimson of the pulp. See, too, how this color comes slowly, as the melon ripens. At first the skin is of the same dark green as the leaves, and inside all is of a greenish white. Let us try to find out where all this color comes from. Do you know we ourselves can make changes in the color of flowers? Take one of those big hydrangeas. It has a pink flower. But give it very rich black earth to grow in. Mix some alum and iron with the earth. Water it with strong bluing water. Lay soot and coal-dust upon the earth it grows in. Very soon your hydrangea will have blue flowers, instead of pink ones. Once I had a petunia with large flowers of a dirty white color. I fed it with soot and coal-dust. I watered it with strong bluing water. After a few weeks my petunia had red or crimson flowers. Some of the flowers were of a very deep red. Others were spotted with red and white. Now from this you may guess that the plant obtains much of its color from what it feeds on in the soil. But you may give the plant very good soil, and yet if you make it grow in the dark, it will have almost no color. If it lives at all, even the green leaves will be pale and sickly. This will show you that the light must act in some way on what the plant eats, to make the fine color. The plant, you know, eats minerals from the earth. In its food it gets little grains of coloring stuff. But how the color goes to the right place we cannot tell. We cannot tell why it is, that from the same earth, in the same light, there will be flowers of many colors. We cannot tell why flowers on the same plant, or parts of the same flower, will have different colors. That is one of the secrets and wonders that no one has found out. There are many plants which store up coloring matter, just as plants store up starch, or sugar. The indigo, which makes our best blue dye, comes from a plant. Ask your mother to show you some indigo. When the plant is soaked in water the coloring stuff sinks to the bottom of the water, like a blue dust. Did you ever notice the fine red sumac? That gives a deep yellow dye. The saffron plant is full of a bright orange color. Other plants give other dyes. Sometimes children take the bright petals of plants, or stems, that have bright color in them, to paint with. Did you ever do that? You can first draw a picture, and then color it, by rubbing on it the colored parts of plants.