304 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
plant. Also our maize and huge pumpkins and 
water-melons, and all our vegetables and fruit. I 
then took a table-knife and went to look for a 
plant, and when I found one I dug down to a depth 
of six inches, and there sure enough was the tuber, 
attached to the root, but quite small—not bigger 
than a hazel-nut—perfectly round with a pimply 
skin, curiously light-coloured, almost pearly. A 
pretty little thing to add to my collection of curios, 
but all the same a potato. How strange! 
From that time I began to take a new interest 
in the potato, and would listen eagerly when the 
subject of potatoes was discussed at table. When 
the potatoes were taken up about the beginning of 
December, and then the second crop in autumn— 
April or May—my father would tell the gardener to 
pick out a few of the biggest for him, and these, 
when washed and weighed, wouid be placed as 
ornaments on the dining-room mantelpiece, in a 
row of half-a-dozen. They were not pretty to look 
at, but they were astonishingly big when I put my 
small marble of a wild potato by the side of them. 
Then when some English neighbour, ten or twenty 
miles away, would ride over to see us and stay to 
lunch, my father would take up the potatoes one 
by one and hand them to him and say: “ What 
do you think of this one? And of this one?” 
Then: “And of this one?” This one would be 
the biggest. Then he would add: “What does 
your biggest potato weigh?”’ And when the other 
replied: “'TTen”—or perhaps twelve—“ ounces,” 
