he fully expected to be summoned to the wheel-house. But Captain Pratt paid no attention to him, and on the following day Selman was reached without any incident worthy of mention.

There Tim was never exactly certain how the matter was arranged. He knew that he was taken into court almost as if he had been a criminal, that many questions were asked him by the Judge, and that a number of gentlemen whom he knew told of the ill-treatment he had received from Captain Babbige.

Then it seemed as if Mr. Tucker had been accused of something, for he told about his business and himself, and showed a great number of letters from people on Minchin's Island, all speaking of him as a kind and good man.

Captain Babbige was there, apparently in a very uncomfortable frame of mind, and he spoke to Tim in the kindest manner possible, asking him if he hadn't always treated him as a son.

Tim was not sure how fathers did treat sons, except in one or two cases; but he told the Captain of what he had said about wanting him to die, and then coaxed the Judge—oh, so hard!—to let him go back with Mr. Tucker.

Then some other people had a good deal to say, the Judge talked some more, and after they were all through, Mr. Tucker told Tim it had been decided he could go back to Minchin's Island.

Tim's delight was so great that it seemed impossible for him to keep his feet on the ground. And when he was back at the island again, in the midst of the crowd of boys who had come to welcome him for the second time, his joy found vent in words.

And when Tim got into Mr. Tucker's house, where Bobby cheered until he was hoarse, and Mrs. Tucker kissed him again and again, he found it impossible even to speak, because of a great lump in his throat, which was not caused by sorrow; but he said over and over to himself that no one should regret in the man what they had done for the homeless orphan boy.

THE END.

A FLOWERLESS FLOUR GARDEN.

BY MRS. SOPHIE B. HERRICK.

We all know, in a general way, that nothing grows unless it is alive, and yet who ever thinks of bread dough as having life in it? There never was a garden bed so full of living plants as is the loaf when it is moulded into shape, and ready to be put into the oven. If you have never watched the mixing of bread, I would advise you to go and look at it the first chance you have, for it is a very curious and entertaining bit of gardening. The cook first prepares her seed, which is the yeast. There are several ways of planting yeast, as there are of planting other seed. You may either soak it to make the seed sprout quickly, or you may start the little plants in a hot-bed, or, again, you may buy your young seedlings, and transplant them into your own garden plot. Just so you may get your yeast seed ready to plant. The yeast cake may be only melted in warm water, or it may be set to start in a cup of water and flour by the warm kitchen fire, or you may buy the yeast already grown at the baker's.

Fig. 1—Toad-stools.

When the seed or seedlings are ready, the garden plot is prepared. The cook heaps up in her bread bowl quarts of snowy flour. Into this heap, after making a hole, she pours her prepared yeast. Working the bread is only another name for the careful scattering of the seed through all the dough, that it may spring up and grow, and fill the whole mass with the tiny plants.

The yeast plant is not a common kind of plant, but belongs to the same class as mushrooms and toad-stools, and the fuzzy, cottony growth that we call mould. There are two kinds of plants that we may find almost anywhere in the fields and woods, and even in the city yards—the fungi and the green plants. The yeast plant is one of the fungi. These are very different in most respects from the green plants: they can live and grow and thrive in darkness; they do not have either leaves or flowers, and they usually spring up and die very quickly. The greatest real difference between the two kinds is, however, that the fungi live on food that has been alive before—on plants, or animals, or decaying matter, while the green plants live on what they get out of the earth and the air and the water.

Fig. 2.—Yeast Plant.
a, Single cells; b, growing plants.

The simplest of all the fungi is the yeast plant. It begins its life as a tiny egg-shaped bag, or sac (Fig. 2 a). This cell, as it is called, is filled with a very curious jelly, perhaps the most wonderful thing in all the world. It is found in everything that lives and grows. By its help the little yeast plant can take the flour and water, and can change it so that while the paste is used up and disappears, the cells grow larger, and sprout out buds. You have particles of this jelly, or protoplasm, lining your mouth and stomach, and the food you eat is changed into flesh and blood and bones by this wonder-working magician. In the figures, the grainy substance is the protoplasm.

This jelly all seems to be pretty much alike, but there is some marvellous difference somewhere—a difference that science has never reached. The yeast cell takes in certain food, and grows, but it never makes anything but other or larger yeast cells. The food you eat and digest makes just you; more of you, perhaps, but still you, yourself, and nobody else.

Fig. 3.—Mould.

Like all living things, the tiny yeast cell must eat and breathe, or it will die. It feeds, not by opening its mouth and taking in its food, but by lying bathed in it, and soaking it up through its skin. When the cook dissolves her yeast cake, and puts it into the spongy dough, she is putting the little plant into its food bath. The cells which have been so long in prison, shut up in the darkness and cold of the dried yeast, begin to look alive, and stretch themselves, and enjoy their liberty. They take kindly to their food right away, and begin helping themselves to what they find about them. They do not merely soak up the flour and water in which they are plunged, but they manage to extract from the compound just what they need.

The cells must not only feed in order to live, but they must breathe, they must somehow get oxygen, which is the gas that our breathing takes out of the air. And this they extract, as a miner does gold, by separating it from its ore. There is a certain amount of sugar in wheat, which gives to good bread and to cracked wheat their delicate sweetness of flavor. Sugar is made up of a number of different substances, which the yeast cell has the power of separating. It takes the oxygen for its own use, and leaves behind the other things that make up the sugar.

Feeding and breathing in this way, by taking what it needs from the flour, the cell grows. When it has reached its mature size, it rests quietly for a while as if it were gathering strength for the effort, and then it sends out a little bud, which grows like the parent cell, until another bud and another grow from it. When the plant is grown, it is very unlike our notion of a plant; it is really nothing more than a little chain of sacs growing end to end. As soon as the little