Porter, trying not to laugh,
though Sammie was a queer sight. "Besides, I told you not to pick my
tomatoes. You have wasted nearly a quart. Now come in and your mother will
wash you."
Into the house he carried the tomato-besmirched little boy, while Hal and
Mab pulled in the express wagon with what were left of the vegetables.
Sammie had squeezed three of the big, ripe tomatoes into a soft pulp
letting the juice and seeds run all over.
"And a tomato has lots of juice and seeds," said Mab as she and Hal told
Daddy and Mother Blake, afterward, what had happened.
"Yes, nearly all vegetables have plenty of seeds," said their father.
"Mother Nature provides them so there may never be any lack. If each
tomato, squash or pumpkin or if each bean or pea pod only had one seed in,
that one might not be a good one. That is it might not have inside it that
strange germ of life, which starts it growing after it is planted.
"So, instead of one seed there are hundreds, as in a watermelon or
muskmelon. And nearly all of them are fertile, or good, so that other
melons may be raised from them.
"You see I only bought a small package of tomato seeds, and yet from them
we will have hundreds of tomatoes, and each tomato may have a hundred
seeds or more, and each of those seeds may be grown into a vine that will
have hundreds of tomatoes on, each with a hundred seeds in it and each of
these seeds--"
"Oh, Daddy! Please stop!" begged Mab with a laugh.
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