The Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Mistress Mary went a step nearer to the robin and looked at him very hard. “I’m lonely,” she said. She had not known before that this was one of the things which made her feel sour and cross. She seemed to find it out when the robin looked at her and she looked at the robin.

The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and to waken her up a little.

She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone.

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 of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.

things can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and

push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one.

Two things cannot be in one place. “Where you tend a rose, my lad, A ...