But there was still one thing they could do to prevent your eating many more green apples, and wasting more half-ripe seeds. They could punish you so severely for having disobeyed their warnings, that you would not be likely very soon to do the same thing again. And this is just what they did. When feeling so ill and unhappy that summer night from all the unripe fruit you had been eating, perhaps you hardly realized that those apples were crying out to you,— “You would not listen to us, and so we are punishing you by making you ill and uncomfortable. When you saw how green we were, we were begging you not to eat us till our young seeds were ripe. When you felt how hard we were, we were trying to make you understand that we were not ready for you yet. And, now that you _have_ eaten us in spite of all that we did to save ourselves and our seeds, we are going to make you just as unhappy as we know how. Perhaps next time you will pay some heed to our warnings, and will leave us alone till we are ready to let our young ones go out into the world.” So after this when I show you an apple, and ask you what you know about it, I fancy you will have quite a story to tell,—a story that begins with one May day in the orchard, when a bee went flower visiting, and ends with the little brown seeds which you let fall upon the ground, when you had finished eating the rosy cheeks and juicy pulp of the apple seed case. And the apple’s story is also the story of many other fruits. [Illustration: Flower] SOME COUSINS OF THE APPLE The pear (Fig. 13) is a near cousin of the apple. But perhaps you did not know that plants and trees had cousins. As you learn more and more about them, you will begin to feel that in many ways plants are very much like people. Both the pear and the apple belong to the Rose family. They are cousins to all the garden roses, as well as to the lovely wild rose that you meet so often in summer along the roadside. [Illustration: FIG. 13] We know some families where the girls and boys look so much alike that we could guess they were brothers and sisters, even if we did not know that they all lived in the one house and had the one family name. If we look carefully at the plants we meet, at their leaves and flowers and fruits, and even at their stems and roots, often we may guess rightly which ones belong to the same family. If we place side by side an apple blossom and a pear blossom, we see that they are very like each other. Both have the green outside cup which above is cut into five little green leaves. Both have five white or pinkish flower leaves. Both have a good many pins with dust boxes, and from two to five of those pins without dust boxes. If we place side by side a pear and an apple, we see in both cases that it is the green cup, grown big and juicy and ripe, which forms the delicious fruit.