The Secret Garden: Chapters Twenty-Three through Twenty-Seven

[Hana]

The final chapters:
Chapter Twenty-Three: Magic
Chapter Twenty-Four: "Let Them Laugh"
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Curtain
Chapter Twenty-Six: "It's Mother!"
Chapter Twenty-Seven: In the Garden

[Hana]

Ben Weatherstaff is becoming one of my favorite characters on this re-reading. He's comic relief, of course, but more than once he is the person who challenges Colin to take the next step. '"I'd like to see thee walk round the garden"...and so the procession was formed.'

[Hana]

Ch 23. I love the description of the unfolding spring and summer in the garden! And Ben Weatherstaff reminisces about Colin's mother loved delphiniums and how she "liked them things as was allus pointin' up to the blue sky...she said as th' blue sky allus looked so joyful."

[Hana]

Ch. 24 I laughed so much at Colin and Mary's playacting and the difficulties they had trying to keep the secret.

The business about meals is wonderful. They are both ravenously hungry from all the exercise and they try not to eat but can't help devouring breakfast, "particularly if there were delicate slices of sizzling ham...they would look into each others eyes in desperation. 'I think we shall have to eat it all this morning, Mary."

[Andrea AKA Catsos Person]

Hana wrote: "Ch 23. I love the description of the unfolding spring and summer in the garden! And Ben Weatherstaff reminisces about Colin's mother loved delphiniums and how she "liked them things as was allus po..."

FHB is wonderfully descriptive about the great outdoors in Yorkshire(?) and about the air from the moors/grounds/land/gardens at Misslethwaite Manor.

I said in an earlier post that I feel as if the robin and moors themselves are characters because of FHBs wonderful description and their importance to the story.

[Andrea AKA Catsos Person]

Hana wrote: "Ch. 24 I laughed so much at Colin and Mary's playacting and the difficulties they had trying to keep the secret.

The business about meals is wonderful. They are both ravenously hungry from all th..."

This was funny to me as well (the meals), but it was in a good cause. Colin wanted a dramatic moment when his father finds out that he can walk and that his son is in fact "cured."

I felt a little sorry for poor Doctor Craven though.

[Lynn, New School Classics]

This is our Revisit the Shelf read for February 2021.