131 
trunk and branches, and by the button-like balls which 
hang from the leafless twigs all winter. 
If you examine one of these twigs, now that they are 
bare of leaves, you see the buds quite plainly ; but if it 
is summer time, when the leaves are clinging to the 
branch, you see no buds, and suppose that they are not 
yet formed. 
But here you are wrong. 
“How can that be?”’. you ask. You looked ¢are- 
fully, and nowhere was there any sign of a bud. 
But you did wot look everywhere, after all. 
If very carefully you had pulled off one of the leaves, 
you would have found the young bud tucked safely 
away beneath the hollow 
end of the leafstalk. This 
leafstalk fitted over it 
more neatly than a can- 
dle snuffer over a candle 
(Fig. 131). 
Try this for yourselves 
next summer. I think you 
will be pleased with this 
pretty arrangement. 
We learned that the 
potato, even though it is buried in the earth and does 
not look like it, is really one of the thickened stems 
of the potato plant. 
The “eyes” of the potato look as little like buds as 
the potato itself looks like a stem. Yet these “eyes” 
are true buds; for, if we leave our potatoes in the dark 
cellar till spring, the ‘“eyes’’ will send out slender 
