The Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Mother says as th’ two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way — or always to have it.

it seemed to Mary that it would be scarcely bearable to leave such delightfulness,

Mother says she believes as half a hour’s good laugh every mornin’ ‘ud cure a chap as was makin’ ready for typhus fever.”

The garden had reached the time when every day and every night it seemed as if Magicians were passing through it drawing loveliness out of the earth and the boughs with wands.

“Dickon says anything will understand if you’re friends with it for sure, but you have to be friends for sure.”

“I wish I was friends with things,” he said at last, “but I’m not. I never had anything to be friends with, and I can’t bear people.”

“Mary,” he said, “I wish I hadn’t said what I did about sending Dickon away. I hated you when you said he was like an angel and I laughed at you but — but perhaps he is.”

she mayn’t be a good child, an’ she mayn’t be a pretty one, but she’s a child, an’ children needs children.’

That night Colin slept without once awakening and when he opened his eyes in the morning he lay still and smiled without knowing it — smiled because he felt so curiously comfortable. It was actually nice to be awake,

It was so nice to have things to think about.

Dickon had carried it over the moor in his arms and its feeding bottle was in his pocket with a squirrel, and when Mary had sat under a tree with its limp warmness huddled on her lap she had felt as if she were too full of strange joy to speak.

“My word!” he said, “he’s got a fine lordly way with him, hasn’t he? You’d think he was a whole Royal Family rolled into one — Prince Consort and all.”

“Well, there’s one thing pretty sure,” said Mrs. Medlock. “If he does live and that Indian child stays here I’ll warrant she teaches him that the whole orange does not belong to him, as Susan Sowerby says. And he’ll be likely to find out the size of his own quarter.”

“That’s really just what it feels like. And if all the flowers and leaves and green things and birds and wild creatures danced past at once, what a crowd it would be! I’m sure they’d dance and sing and flute and that would be the wafts of music.”

The arch of it looked very high and the small snowy clouds seemed like white birds floating on outspread wings below its crystal blueness.

He looked so strange and different because a pink glow of color had actually crept all over him — ivory face and neck and hands and all.

“I shall get well! I shall get well!” he cried out. “Mary! Dickon! I shall get well! And I shall live forever and ever and ever!”

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever.

One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun — which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and a...

Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it ...

“Eh! it is graidely,” he said. “I’m twelve goin’ on thirteen an’ there’s a lot o’ afternoons in thirteen years, but seems to me like I never seed one as graidely as this ’ere.”

They drew the chair under the plum-tree, which was snow-white with blossoms and musical with bees. It was like a king’s canopy, a fairy king’s.

“We mun look as if it wasn’t no different from th’ other trees,” he had said. “We couldn’t never tell him how it broke, poor lad. If he says anything about it we mun — we mun try to look cheerful.”

Happen she’s been in the garden an’ happen it was her set us to work, an’ told us to bring him here.”

The afternoon was dragging toward its mellow hour. The sun was deepening the gold of its lances, the bees were going home and the birds were flying past less often.

“I’m going to get nothing else,” he answered. “I’ve seen the spring now and I’m going to see the summer. I’m going to see everything grow here. I’m going to grow here myself.”

What Ben Weatherstaff did Mary thought queer beyond measure. He choked and gulped and suddenly tears ran down his weather-wrinkled cheeks as he struck his old hands together. “Eh!” he burst forth, “th’ lies folk tells! Tha’rt as thin as a lath an’ as white as a wraith, but there’s not a knob on thee. Tha’lt make a mon yet. God bless thee!”

“Tha’s doin’ Magic thysel’,” he said. “It’s same Magic as made these ’ere work out o’ th’ earth,” and he touched with his thick boot a clump of crocuses in the grass.

She was saying it to Colin because she wanted to make Magic and keep him on his feet looking like that.

She was uplifted by a sudden feeling that he looked quite beautiful in spite of his thinness.

“Every one thought I was going to die,” said Colin shortly. “I’m not!”

The chief thing to be remembered, she had told him, was that Colin was getting well — getting well. The garden was doing it. No one must let him remember about having humps and dying.

“It is my garden now, I am fond of it. I shall come here every day,” announced Colin. “But it is to be a secret. My orders are that no one is to know that we come here. Dickon and my cousin have worked and made it come alive. I shall send for you sometimes to help — but you must come when no one can see you.”

Ben Weatherstaff’s face twisted itself in a dry old smile. “I’ve come here before when no one saw me,” he said.

“But no one has been in it for ten years!” cried Colin. “There was no door!” “I’m no one,” said old Ben dryly.

“She was so fond of it — she was!” said Ben Weatherstaff slowly. “An’ she was such a pretty young thing. She says to me once, ‘Ben,’ says she laughin’, ‘if ever I’m ill or if I go away you must take care of my roses.’ When she did go away th’ orders was no one was ever to come nigh. But I come,” with grumpy obstinacy. “Over th’ wall I come — until th’ rheumatics stopped me — an’ I did a bit o’ work once a year. She’d gave her order first.”

Ben Weatherstaff brought the rose in its pot from the greenhouse. He hobbled over the grass as fast as he could. He had begun to be excited, too. He knelt down by the hole and broke the pot from the mould.

And Dickon helped him, and the Magic — or whatever it was — so gave him strength that when the sun did slip over the edge and end the strange lovely afternoon for them there he actually stood on his two feet — laughing.

Even Mary had found out that one of Colin’s chief peculiarities was that he did not know in the least what a rude little brute he was with his way of ordering people about.

He was a very proud boy. He lay thinking for a while and then Mary saw his beautiful smile begin and gradually change his whole face. “I shall stop being queer,” he said, “if I go every day to the garden. There is Magic in there — good Magic, you know, Mary. I am sure there is.”

The seeds Dickon and Mary had planted grew as if fairies had tended them.

And this was not the half of the Magic. The fact that he had really once stood on his feet had set Colin thinking tremendously and when Mary told him of the spell she had worked he was excited and approved of it greatly. He talked of it constantly.

“Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world,” he said wisely one day, “but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment.”

“The great scientific discoveries I am going to make,” he went on, “will be about Magic. Magic is a great thing and scarcely any one knows anything about it except a few people in old books — and Mary a little, because she was born in India where there are fakirs.

I believe Dickon knows some Magic, but perhaps he doesn’t know he knows it. He charms animals and people. I would never have let him come to see me if he had not been an animal charmer — which is a boy charmer, too, because a boy is an animal.

I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us — like...

Scientific people are always curious and I am going to be scientific.

Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something were pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast.

Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of Magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.