awk BEGIN END syntax

[Michael Herdman]

Hi,
How can I resolve the following problem? I have an infile with two 
tab-separated columns the first of which contains two words separated by 
a single space:

a b    g
c d    h
e f    i

When I run the following awk command, in which the quotation marks are 
escaped to retain them:

awk 'BEGIN {print "<tr><td class=\"Col1_col\">"$1"</td><td 
class=\"Col2_col\">"$2"</td></tr>"}' infile > outfile

I expect the outfile to contain:

<tr><td class="Col1_col"a b></td><td class="Col2_col"g></td></tr>
but $1 and $2 are not returned.

I know that the BEGIN statement has to be followed somewhere by an END 
statement, but I do not see where to put it or what action to assign to it.

--
Michael Herdman
Institut Pasteur (retired)
Visit the cyanobacterial reference phylogeny site:
http://cyanophylogeny.scienceontheweb.net/