"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."
"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."
"What do you mean by a single cell?"