This baby plant is a very fascinating thing to look at. I never seem to tire of picking apart a young seed for the sake of examining through a glass these delicate bright-green leaves. It seems so wonderful that the vine which twines far above our heads, covered with glorious flowers, should come from this green speck. As this morning-glory is a vine which lives at many of your doorsteps, I hope you will not fail to collect its seeds, and look at their baby plants. When these are very young, still surrounded by a quantity of baby food, you will not be able to make them out unless you carry them to your teacher and borrow her glass; but when the seed is ripe, and the little plant has eaten away most of the surrounding food, it grows so big that you can see it quite plainly with your own eyes. A SCHOOLROOM GARDEN I want you children to do a little gardening in the schoolroom. You will enjoy this, I am sure. When I was a child, I took great delight in the experiments that I am going to suggest to you; and now that I am grown up, I find they please me even more than they did years ago. During the past week I have been doing this sort of gardening; and I have become so interested in the plant babies which I have helped into the world, that I have not been at all ready to stop playing with them, even for the sake of sitting down to tell you about them. To start my garden, I had first to get some seeds. So I put on my hat and went down to the little shop in the village, half of which is given up to tailor work, while the other half is devoted to flower raising. The gray-bearded florist tailor who runs this queer little place was greatly interested when he heard that I wanted the seeds so that I might tell you children something of their strange ways. “Seeds air mighty interestin’ things,” he said. “Be you young or be you old, there’s nothin’ sets you thinkin’ like a seed.” Perhaps the florist tailor had been fortunate in his friends; for I have known both grown-up people and children who year after year could see the wonder of seed and baby plant, of flower and fruit, without once stopping to say, “What brings about these changes?” To “set thinking” some people would take an earthquake or an avalanche; but when this sort of thing is needed to start their brains working, the “thinking” is not likely to be good for much. But I hope that some of you will find plenty to think about in the seeds which your teacher is going to show you; and I hope that these thoughts may be the beginning of an interest and curiosity that will last as long as you live. The seeds which I got that morning were those of the bean, squash, pea, and corn; and your teacher has been good enough to get for you these same seeds, and she will show you how to do with them just what I have been doing this past week.