be coming soon but the sight of them was a greater surprise than any Christmas Day Ann ever had known. To think that the little hard beans that she had dropped and covered with fine earth had been growing and putting out such curly twisted sprouts that had shot up overnight! The dear baby things! She knelt down to touch46 them but Jo’s voice stopped her. He had walked while she ran forward in reply to Ben’s call.

46

“I wouldn’t do that,” he suggested mildly. “The morning dew is on them and nobody touches beans while they’re wet. It turns them black when they get bigger.”

“But there are no beans yet,” Ann protested, looking up at Jo over her shoulder. “I don’t see how I could hurt them if I touched them delicately, just to find out whether they feel as strong as they look.”

“It doesn’t make any difference how young they are,” Jo answered. “It won’t seem to hurt them when you touch them, but when the beans form on the plants you have handled nobody will be able to eat them. They’ll be black and spotted; rusted, the farmers call it. Of course sometimes you can’t help beans rusting when there’s too much rain.”

“What makes them rust?” asked Ben. “You wouldn’t imagine that the grown-up plants would remember anything that happened to them when they were babies.”

“I don’t know why,” and Jo shook his head. “I wish I did know more about it. I don’t know any reasons, but there must be some. I only know that things happen, not why.”

“Well, I know this much,” said Ann decidedly. “When I go back to school this fall I shall find out, and then I’ll write to tell you, Jo.”

“That would be fine. I’d like that,” Jo said shyly.

47 Ben had gone over to the rows of corn and potatoes, and he came back with a perplexed expression on his face. “Where are they?” he asked. “Do you suppose that some animal has eaten them? We shall have nothing but beans in our gardens, or can we plant more corn and potatoes?”

47

Jo threw back his head and laughed heartily.

“What did you expect?” he asked. “Did you think that everything came through at the same time? The potatoes ought to sprout within a day or two, but corn is slow. It often takes three weeks. The weather has hardly been hot enough to start it yet. You need hot weather to make corn 

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