The snow was so beautiful that they had not wanted to do anything all the afternoon but gaze at it. Dicky, Ethel Brown's little brother, who was the "honorary member" of the U.S.C., had come in wanting to be amused, and they had opened the window for an inch and brought in a few of the huge flakes which grew into ferns and starry crystals under the magnifying glass that Mrs. Morton always kept on the desk.
"Wouldn't it be fun if our eyeth could thee thingth like that!" exclaimed Dicky, and the girls agreed with him that it would add many marvels to our already marvellous world.
"As long as our eyes can't see the wee things I'm glad Aunt Marion taught us to use this glass when we were little," said Ethel Blue who had been brought up with her cousins ever since she was a baby.
"Mother says that when she and Uncle Roger and Uncle Richard," said Dorothy, referring to Ethel Brown's and Ethel Blue's fathers, her uncles--"were all young at home together Grandfather Morton used to make them examine some new thing every day and tell him about it. Sometimes it would be the materials a piece of clothing was made of, or the paper of a magazine or a flower--anything that came along."
[Illustration: "It looked just as if it were a house with a lot of rooms"]
"When I grow up," said Ethel Blue, "I'm going to have a large microscope like the one they have in the biology class in the high school. Helen took me to the class with her one day and the teacher let me look through it. It was perfectly wonderful. There was a slice of the stem of a small plant there and it looked just as if it were a house with a lot of rooms. Each room was a cell, Helen said."
"A very suitable name," commented Ethel Brown.
"What are you people talking about?" asked Helen, who came in at that instant.
"I was telling the girls about that time when I looked through the high school microscope," answered Ethel Blue.
"You saw among other things, some cells in the very lowest form of life. A single cell is all there is to the lowest animal or vegetable."
"Just a tiny mass of jelly-like stuff that is called protoplasm. The cells grow larger and divide until there are a lot of them. That's the way plants and animals grow."