text: the secret garden was what mary called it when she was thinking of it she liked the name and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was it seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place the few books she had read and liked had been fairy story books and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years which she had thought must be rather stupid she had no intention of going to sleep and in fact she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at misselthwaite