68 THE CORN LADY 



"Wish you'd let us do that sometime and 

 serve the girls." 



I only wish you, mother and the rest might 

 have been here, for you surely would have en- 

 joyed the spread that my girls gave. 



We have been testing seed com the past 

 week. Each pupil already had the ears of 

 corn at school that they had picked on Seed 

 Corn Picking Day. We had hung these up 

 and kept them. Then each of the pupils 

 brought two more ears. So altogether we 

 had quite a lot of corn to test. One of the 

 boys brought a box and two of them went 

 about a mile through the snow to get some 

 fresh saw-dust. We wet the saw-dust thor- 

 oughly, then covered it with a strong muslin 

 cloth on which we had marked out and num- 

 bered squares for each ear. The boys num- 

 bered the ears and arranged them in rows of 

 ten each on the floor. Then each pupil put 

 in six grains from each of his ears of corn. 

 These six grains were taken from different 

 parts of the ear. We took another cloth and 

 placed it over the corn and on this we put 

 some more saw-dust. In about five days the 

 corn had sprouted. Almost every ear that 

 had been picked early sprouted perfectly, 

 every grain growing, but some of the other 



