The next day the rain poured down in torrents again, and when Mary
looked out of her window the moor was almost hidden by gray mist and
cloud.  There could be no going out today.

"What do you do in your cottage when it rains like this?" she asked
Martha.

"Try to keep from under each other's feet mostly," Martha answered.
"Eh! there does seem a lot of us then.  Mother's a good-tempered woman
but she gets fair moithered.  The biggest ones goes out in th' cow-shed
and plays there.  Dickon he doesn't mind th' wet.  He goes out just th'
same as if th' sun was shinin'. He says he sees things on rainy days as
doesn't show when it's fair weather.  He once found a little fox cub
half drowned in its hole and he brought it home in th' bosom of his
shirt to keep it warm.  Its mother had been killed nearby an' th' hole
was swum out an' th' rest o' th' litter was dead.  He's got it at home
now.  He found a half-drowned young crow another time an' he brought it
home, too, an' tamed it.  It's named Soot because it's so black, an' it
hops an' flies about with him everywhere."

The time had come when Mary had forgotten to resent Martha's familiar
talk.  She had even begun to find it interesting and to be sorry when
she stopped or went away.  The stories she had been told by her Ayah
when she lived in India had been quite unlike those Martha had to tell
about the moorland cottage which held fourteen people who lived in four
little rooms and never had quite enough to eat.  The children seemed to
tumble about and amuse themselves like a litter of rough, good-natured
collie puppies.  Mary was most attracted by the mother and Dickon.
When Martha told stories of what "mother" said or did they always
sounded comfortable.

"If I had a raven or a fox cub I could play with it," said Mary.  "But
I have nothing."

Martha looked perplexed.

"Can tha' knit?" she asked.

"No," answered Mary.

"Can tha' sew?"

"No."

"Can tha' read?"

"Yes."

"Then why doesn't tha, read somethin', or learn a bit o' spellin'?
Tha'st old enough to be learnin' thy book a good bit now."

"I haven't any books," said Mary.  "Those I had were left in India."

"That's a pity," said Martha.  "If Mrs. Medlock'd let thee go into th'
library, there's thousands o' books there."

Mary did not ask where the library was, because she was suddenly
inspired by a new idea.  She made up her mind to go and find it
herself.  She was not troubled about Mrs. Medlock.  Mrs. Medlock seemed
always to be in her comfortable housekeeper's sitting-room downstairs.
In this queer place one scarcely ever saw any one at all.  In fact,
there was no one to see but the servants, and when their master was
away they lived a luxurious life below stairs, where there was a huge
kitchen hung about with shining brass and pewter, and a large servants'
hall where there were four or five abundant meals eaten every day, and
where a great deal of lively romping went on when Mrs. Medlock was out
of the way.

Mary's meals were served regularly, and Martha waited on her, but no
one troubled themselves about her in the least.  Mrs. Medlock came and
looked at her every day or two, but no one inquired what she did or
told her what to do.  She supposed that perhaps this was the English
way of treating children.  In India she had always been attended by her
Ayah, who had followed her about and waited on her, hand and foot.  She
had often been tired of her company.  Now she was followed by nobody
and was learning to dress herself because Martha looked as though she
thought she was silly and stupid when she wanted to have things handed
to her and put on.

"Hasn't tha' got good sense?" she said once, when Mary had stood
waiting for her to put on her gloves for her.  "Our Susan Ann is twice
as sharp as thee an' she's only four year' old.  Sometimes tha' looks
fair soft in th' head."

Mary had worn her contrary scowl for an hour after that, but it made
her think several entirely new things.

She stood at the window for about ten minutes this morning after Martha
had swept up the hearth for the last time and gone downstairs.  She was
thinking over the new idea which had come to her when she heard of the
library.  She did not care very much about the library itself, because
she had read very few books; but to hear of it brought back to her mind
the hundred rooms with closed doors.  She wondered if they were all
really locked and what she would find if she could get into any of
them.  Were there a hundred really? Why shouldn't she go and see how
many doors she could count? It would be something to do on this morning
when she could not go out.  She had never been taught to ask permission
to do things, and she knew nothing at all about authority, so she would
not have thought it necessary to ask Mrs. Medlock if she might walk
about the house, even if she had seen her.

She opened the door of the room and went into the corridor, and then
she began her wanderings.  It was a long corridor and it branched into
other corridors and it led her up short flights of steps which mounted
to others again.  There were doors and doors, and there were pictures
on the walls.  Sometimes they were pictures of dark, curious
landscapes, but oftenest they were portraits of men and women in queer,
grand costumes made of satin and velvet.  She found herself in one long
gallery whose walls were covered with these portraits.  She had never
thought there could be so many in any house.  She walked slowly down
this place and stared at the faces which also seemed to stare at her.
She felt as if they were wondering what a little girl from India was
doing in their house.  Some were pictures of children--little girls in
thick satin frocks which reached to their feet and stood out about
them, and boys with puffed sleeves and lace collars and long hair, or
with big ruffs around their necks.  She always stopped to look at the
children, and wonder what their names were, and where they had gone,
and why they wore such odd clothes.  There was a stiff, plain little
girl rather like herself.  She wore a green brocade dress and held a
green parrot on her finger.  Her eyes had a sharp, curious look.

"Where do you live now?" said Mary aloud to her.  "I wish you were
here."

Surely no other little girl ever spent such a queer morning.  It seemed
as if there was no one in all the huge rambling house but her own small
self, wandering about upstairs and down, through narrow passages and
wide ones, where it seemed to her that no one but herself had ever
walked.  Since so many rooms had been built, people must have lived in
them, but it all seemed so empty that she could not quite believe it
true.

It was not until she climbed to the second floor that she thought of
turning the handle of a door.  All the doors were shut, as Mrs. Medlock
had said they were, but at last she put her hand on the handle of one
of them and turned it.  She was almost frightened for a moment when she
felt that it turned without difficulty and that when she pushed upon
the door itself it slowly and heavily opened.  It was a massive door
and opened into a big bedroom.  There were embroidered hangings on the
wall, and inlaid furniture such as she had seen in India stood about
the room.  A broad window with leaded panes looked out upon the moor;
and over the mantel was another portrait of the stiff, plain little
girl who seemed to stare at her more curiously than ever.

"Perhaps she slept here once," said Mary.  "She stares at me so that
she makes me feel queer."

After that she opened more doors and more.  She saw so many rooms that
she became quite tired and began to think that there must be a hundred,
though she had not counted them.  In all of them there were old
pictures or old tapestries with strange scenes worked on them.  There
were curious pieces of furniture and curious ornaments in nearly all of
them.

In one room, which looked like a lady's sitting-room, the hangings were
all embroidered velvet, and in a cabinet were about a hundred little
elephants made of ivory.  They were of different sizes, and some had
their mahouts or palanquins on their backs.  Some were much bigger than
the others and some were so tiny that they seemed only babies.  Mary
had seen carved ivory in India and she knew all about elephants.  She
opened the door of the cabinet and stood on a footstool and played with
these for quite a long time.  When she got tired she set the elephants
in order and shut the door of the cabinet.

In all her wanderings through the long corridors and the empty rooms,
she had seen nothing alive; but in this room she saw something.  Just
after she had closed the cabinet door she heard a tiny rustling sound.
It made her jump and look around at the sofa by the fireplace, from
which it seemed to come.  In the corner of the sofa there was a
cushion, and in the velvet which covered it there was a hole, and out
of the hole peeped a tiny head with a pair of frightened eyes in it.

Mary crept softly across the room to look.  The bright eyes belonged to
a little gray mouse, and the mouse had eaten a hole into the cushion
and made a comfortable nest there.  Six baby mice were cuddled up
asleep near her.  If there was no one else alive in the hundred rooms
there were seven mice who did not look lonely at all.

"If they wouldn't be so frightened I would take them back with me,"
said Mary.

She had wandered about long enough to feel too tired to wander any
farther, and she turned back.  Two or three times she lost her way by
turning down the wrong corridor and was obliged to ramble up and down
until she found the right one; but at last she reached her own floor
again, though she was some distance from her own room and did not know
exactly where she was.

"I believe I have taken a wrong turning again," she said, standing
still at what seemed the end of a short passage with tapestry on the
wall.  "I don't know which way to go.  How still everything is!"

It was while she was standing here and just after she had said this
that the stillness was broken by a sound.  It was another cry, but not
quite like the one she had heard last night; it was only a short one, a
fretful childish whine muffled by passing through walls.

"It's nearer than it was," said Mary, her heart beating rather faster.
"And it is crying."

She put her hand accidentally upon the tapestry near her, and then
sprang back, feeling quite startled.  The tapestry was the covering of
a door which fell open and showed her that there was another part of
the corridor behind it, and Mrs. Medlock was coming up it with her
bunch of keys in her hand and a very cross look on her face.

"What are you doing here?" she said, and she took Mary by the arm and
pulled her away.  "What did I tell you?"

"I turned round the wrong corner," explained Mary.  "I didn't know
which way to go and I heard some one crying." She quite hated Mrs.
Medlock at the moment, but she hated her more the next.

"You didn't hear anything of the sort," said the housekeeper.  "You
come along back to your own nursery or I'll box your ears."

And she took her by the arm and half pushed, half pulled her up one
passage and down another until she pushed her in at the door of her own
room.

"Now," she said, "you stay where you're told to stay or you'll find
yourself locked up.  The master had better get you a governess, same as
he said he would.  You're one that needs some one to look sharp after
you.  I've got enough to do."

She went out of the room and slammed the door after her, and Mary went
and sat on the hearth-rug, pale with rage.  She did not cry, but ground
her teeth.

"There was some one crying--there was--there was!" she said to herself.

She had heard it twice now, and sometime she would find out.  She had
found out a great deal this morning.  She felt as if she had been on a
long journey, and at any rate she had had something to amuse her all
the time, and she had played with the ivory elephants and had seen the
gray mouse and its babies in their nest in the velvet cushion.

The following day, a rainstorm keeps Mary indoors. She realizes that she is beginning to like both Martha and her stories of her family, and feels an affinity with both Dickon and Martha's mother, though she has never met either of them. To keep herself occupied despite the rain, Mary sets out to search for Misselthwaite's library, and to explore its hundreds of shuttered rooms. She is not concerned that anyone will try to stop her, because no one in the manor much troubles themselves with her. In Yorkshire, unlike in India, Mary must fend for herself. As she walks through the manor's corridors, Mary notices many portraits of grand, antique-looking men and women hanging upon the walls; their faces seem to wonder at how a girl from India came to live on their estate. She is much interested in the portraits of children, and even speaks to one of a girl who looks like Mary herself: the girl is curious-looking, and a green parrot is perched upon her finger. Mary wishes the girl in the portrait were there to keep her company; she feels that there is no one at all alive in Misselthwaite save for herself. Upon entering one of the rooms that open onto the corridor, Mary finds yet another portrait of the girl who looks so like her. The girl's stare unnerves her, and she leaves to explore a number of other rooms, stopping finally in one that might have once been a lady's sitting room. There, Mary happens upon a collection of ivory elephants; as she knows all about both ivory and elephants from her life in India, she is quite taken with them. Suddenly, she hears a soft rustling sound behind her, and turns to find a family of gray mice living in one of the room's velvet cushions. Mary thinks to herself that, though the mice and she may be the only living things in the manor at that moment, the mice, having each other, are not lonely at all. Upon going back into the corridor, Mary again hears a child's cry; when she goes off in search of its source, she is apprehended by a furious Mrs. Medlock, who takes her back to her room.

The fifth chapter opens by detailing the restorative effect the moor has begun to have upon Mary: she has started, in the words of the book, to "wake up. Mary's curiosity about the secret garden is presented as both the most important symptom and the most vital cause of her newfound alertness. The pivotal opposition between wakefulness and sleep is reinforced here, with the former being aligned with England and the latter with despised India:   gave her so much to think of that she began to be quite interested. In India she had always felt hot and too languid to care much about anything. The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and waken her up a little. Throughout The Secret Garden, both climate and landscape are presented as having a determining influence upon one's health and well-being; that is, one can only be truly healthy by being in harmony with one's environment. This motif comes out of Hodgson Burnett's own fascination with the Christian Science and New Thought movements, which held that the natural landscape was suffused with the spirit of the Christian god, and thus had healing capacities. This idea will recur ceaselessly throughout the novel and is, in large part, its central motif. Another way in which the novel reworks common Christian myths can be found in its positioning of the secret garden as a kind of Eden. Eden was the garden in which the first humans created by God  lived until God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The secret garden is connected with Eden through Martha's story of the divine times had there by Master Craven and his wife before her quite literal fall--before, that is, she fell out of the rose-tree to her death. Master Craven's fanatical insistence upon secrecy is here revealed to extend even further than the reader first suspected: the servants may not talk of his wife nor of her death, nor of the garden, nor of the strange cries that Mary hears in this chapter for the first time. His prohibition is utterly disregarded by Mary. Her voyage through the great house reinforces the book's uncanny fairy-tale quality, in that it seems to Mary that the "hundred rooms" have always stood empty; furthermore, the very paintings on the walls seem to follow Mary with their eyes, and one seems to be of Mary herself, as she would have looked if she had lived one hundred years before. Mary's discovery of the ivory elephants and frightened family of mice in the abandoned bedchamber provides yet another example of the opposition between India and England. India, here represented by the elephants, is stony, chill, and lifeless; England, represented by the wide-eyed mice in the velvet cushion, promises life and companionship. Mary's fascination with Dickon and with Martha's mother, Mrs. Sowerby, also increases in this chapter. Her interest in these two arises, in some measure, out of her own motherlessness: she imagines that Mrs. Sowerby might "comfort" her, as her own mother never did. Dickon, in this chapter, is described as being a caretaker of motherless things: Martha mentions that he has a pet fox-cub and a pet crow, both of whom he saved after the deaths of their mothers


Two days after this, when Mary opened her eyes she sat upright in bed
immediately, and called to Martha.

"Look at the moor! Look at the moor!"

The rainstorm had ended and the gray mist and clouds had been swept
away in the night by the wind.  The wind itself had ceased and a
brilliant, deep blue sky arched high over the moorland.  Never, never
had Mary dreamed of a sky so blue.  In India skies were hot and
blazing; this was of a deep cool blue which almost seemed to sparkle
like the waters of some lovely bottomless lake, and here and there,
high, high in the arched blueness floated small clouds of snow-white
fleece.  The far-reaching world of the moor itself looked softly blue
instead of gloomy purple-black or awful dreary gray.

"Aye," said Martha with a cheerful grin.  "Th' storm's over for a bit.
It does like this at this time o' th' year.  It goes off in a night
like it was pretendin' it had never been here an' never meant to come
again.  That's because th' springtime's on its way.  It's a long way
off yet, but it's comin'."

"I thought perhaps it always rained or looked dark in England," Mary
said.

"Eh! no!" said Martha, sitting up on her heels among her black lead
brushes.  "Nowt o' th' soart!"

"What does that mean?" asked Mary seriously.  In India the natives
spoke different dialects which only a few people understood, so she was
not surprised when Martha used words she did not know.

Martha laughed as she had done the first morning.

"There now," she said.  "I've talked broad Yorkshire again like Mrs.
Medlock said I mustn't. 'Nowt o' th' soart' means
'nothin'-of-the-sort,'" slowly and carefully, "but it takes so long to
say it.  Yorkshire's th' sunniest place on earth when it is sunny.  I
told thee tha'd like th' moor after a bit.  Just you wait till you see
th' gold-colored gorse blossoms an' th' blossoms o' th' broom, an' th'
heather flowerin', all purple bells, an' hundreds o' butterflies
flutterin' an' bees hummin' an' skylarks soarin' up an' singin'. You'll
want to get out on it as sunrise an' live out on it all day like Dickon
does." "Could I ever get there?" asked Mary wistfully, looking through
her window at the far-off blue.  It was so new and big and wonderful
and such a heavenly color.

"I don't know," answered Martha.  "Tha's never used tha' legs since
tha' was born, it seems to me.  Tha' couldn't walk five mile.  It's
five mile to our cottage."

"I should like to see your cottage."

Martha stared at her a moment curiously before she took up her
polishing brush and began to rub the grate again.  She was thinking
that the small plain face did not look quite as sour at this moment as
it had done the first morning she saw it.  It looked just a trifle like
little Susan Ann's when she wanted something very much.

"I'll ask my mother about it," she said.  "She's one o' them that
nearly always sees a way to do things.  It's my day out today an' I'm
goin' home.  Eh! I am glad.  Mrs. Medlock thinks a lot o' mother.
Perhaps she could talk to her."

"I like your mother," said Mary.

"I should think tha' did," agreed Martha, polishing away.

"I've never seen her," said Mary.

"No, tha' hasn't," replied Martha.

She sat up on her heels again and rubbed the end of her nose with the
back of her hand as if puzzled for a moment, but she ended quite
positively.

"Well, she's that sensible an' hard workin' an' goodnatured an' clean
that no one could help likin' her whether they'd seen her or not.  When
I'm goin' home to her on my day out I just jump for joy when I'm
crossin' the moor."

"I like Dickon," added Mary.  "And I've never seen him."

"Well," said Martha stoutly, "I've told thee that th' very birds likes
him an' th' rabbits an' wild sheep an' ponies, an' th' foxes
themselves.  I wonder," staring at her reflectively, "what Dickon would
think of thee?"

"He wouldn't like me," said Mary in her stiff, cold little way.  "No
one does."

Martha looked reflective again.

"How does tha' like thysel'?" she inquired, really quite as if she were
curious to know.

Mary hesitated a moment and thought it over.

"Not at all--really," she answered.  "But I never thought of that
before."

Martha grinned a little as if at some homely recollection.

"Mother said that to me once," she said.  "She was at her wash-tub an'
I was in a bad temper an' talkin' ill of folk, an' she turns round on
me an' says: 'Tha' young vixen, tha'! There tha' stands sayin' tha'
doesn't like this one an' tha' doesn't like that one.  How does tha'
like thysel'?' It made me laugh an' it brought me to my senses in a
minute."

She went away in high spirits as soon as she had given Mary her
breakfast.  She was going to walk five miles across the moor to the
cottage, and she was going to help her mother with the washing and do
the week's baking and enjoy herself thoroughly.

Mary felt lonelier than ever when she knew she was no longer in the
house.  She went out into the garden as quickly as possible, and the
first thing she did was to run round and round the fountain flower
garden ten times.  She counted the times carefully and when she had
finished she felt in better spirits.  The sunshine made the whole place
look different.  The high, deep, blue sky arched over Misselthwaite as
well as over the moor, and she kept lifting her face and looking up
into it, trying to imagine what it would be like to lie down on one of
the little snow-white clouds and float about.  She went into the first
kitchen-garden and found Ben Weatherstaff working there with two other
gardeners.  The change in the weather seemed to have done him good.  He
spoke to her of his own accord.  "Springtime's comin,'" he said.
"Cannot tha' smell it?"

Mary sniffed and thought she could.

"I smell something nice and fresh and damp," she said.

"That's th' good rich earth," he answered, digging away.  "It's in a
good humor makin' ready to grow things.  It's glad when plantin' time
comes.  It's dull in th' winter when it's got nowt to do.  In th'
flower gardens out there things will be stirrin' down below in th'
dark.  Th' sun's warmin' 'em. You'll see bits o' green spikes stickin'
out o' th' black earth after a bit."

"What will they be?" asked Mary.

"Crocuses an' snowdrops an' daffydowndillys.  Has tha' never seen them?"

"No. Everything is hot, and wet, and green after the rains in India,"
said Mary.  "And I think things grow up in a night."

"These won't grow up in a night," said Weatherstaff.  "Tha'll have to
wait for 'em. They'll poke up a bit higher here, an' push out a spike
more there, an' uncurl a leaf this day an' another that.  You watch
'em."

"I am going to," answered Mary.

Very soon she heard the soft rustling flight of wings again and she
knew at once that the robin had come again.  He was very pert and
lively, and hopped about so close to her feet, and put his head on one
side and looked at her so slyly that she asked Ben Weatherstaff a
question.

"Do you think he remembers me?" she said.

"Remembers thee!" said Weatherstaff indignantly.  "He knows every
cabbage stump in th' gardens, let alone th' people.  He's never seen a
little wench here before, an' he's bent on findin' out all about thee.
Tha's no need to try to hide anything from him."

"Are things stirring down below in the dark in that garden where he
lives?" Mary inquired.

"What garden?" grunted Weatherstaff, becoming surly again.

"The one where the old rose-trees are." She could not help asking,
because she wanted so much to know.  "Are all the flowers dead, or do
some of them come again in the summer? Are there ever any roses?"

"Ask him," said Ben Weatherstaff, hunching his shoulders toward the
robin.  "He's the only one as knows.  No one else has seen inside it
for ten year'."

Ten years was a long time, Mary thought.  She had been born ten years
ago.

She walked away, slowly thinking.  She had begun to like the garden
just as she had begun to like the robin and Dickon and Martha's mother.
She was beginning to like Martha, too.  That seemed a good many people
to like--when you were not used to liking.  She thought of the robin as
one of the people.  She went to her walk outside the long, ivy-covered
wall over which she could see the tree-tops; and the second time she
walked up and down the most interesting and exciting thing happened to
her, and it was all through Ben Weatherstaff's robin.

She heard a chirp and a twitter, and when she looked at the bare
flower-bed at her left side there he was hopping about and pretending
to peck things out of the earth to persuade her that he had not
followed her.  But she knew he had followed her and the surprise so
filled her with delight that she almost trembled a little.

"You do remember me!" she cried out.  "You do! You are prettier than
anything else in the world!"

She chirped, and talked, and coaxed and he hopped, and flirted his tail
and twittered.  It was as if he were talking.  His red waistcoat was
like satin and he puffed his tiny breast out and was so fine and so
grand and so pretty that it was really as if he were showing her how
important and like a human person a robin could be.  Mistress Mary
forgot that she had ever been contrary in her life when he allowed her
to draw closer and closer to him, and bend down and talk and try to
make something like robin sounds.

Oh! to think that he should actually let her come as near to him as
that! He knew nothing in the world would make her put out her hand
toward him or startle him in the least tiniest way.  He knew it because
he was a real person--only nicer than any other person in the world.
She was so happy that she scarcely dared to breathe.

The flower-bed was not quite bare.  It was bare of flowers because the
perennial plants had been cut down for their winter rest, but there
were tall shrubs and low ones which grew together at the back of the
bed, and as the robin hopped about under them she saw him hop over a
small pile of freshly turned up earth.  He stopped on it to look for a
worm.  The earth had been turned up because a dog had been trying to
dig up a mole and he had scratched quite a deep hole.

Mary looked at it, not really knowing why the hole was there, and as
she looked she saw something almost buried in the newly-turned soil.
It was something like a ring of rusty iron or brass and when the robin
flew up into a tree nearby she put out her hand and picked the ring up.
It was more than a ring, however; it was an old key which looked as if
it had been buried a long time.

Mistress Mary stood up and looked at it with an almost frightened face
as it hung from her finger.

"Perhaps it has been buried for ten years," she said in a whisper.
"Perhaps it is the key to the garden!"

On the following day, the storm has passed, and Martha tells Mary that spring will soon come to the moor. Martha is planning to go home to visit her family, as it is her only free day of the month. Mary asks Martha if she might someday visit her family's cottage. Martha is not certain if it will be possible, but says that she will ask her mother, who is quite clever about such things. After a pause, Mary remarks that she likes both Martha's mother and Dickon, though she has seen neither of them; she bitterly adds that she suspects that they would not like her, because no one does. Martha asks the girl if she likes herself, and Mary surprises both of them by saying, "Not at all. After Martha sets out for home, Mary goes out into the gardens, where she finds Ben Weatherstaff in a good humor. Ben tells her that the earth itself is glad, as it has been eagerly waiting for spring. As the two stand talking, the robin appears and lights at their feet. Mary tentatively asks Ben Weatherstaff if anything is still living in the secret garden, and he replies that only the robin knows, as no one else has been inside in ten years. It occurs to Mary that she was born ten years ago, at around the same time that the garden was bolted shut. Mary wanders off, following the wall of the garden without a door. She realizes that she is fond of a number of people for the first time in her life--of Martha, and Dickon, and Martha's mother, and of the robin, whom she thinks of as a person. The robin follows her, and Mary again tries to talk to him in chirps and twitters. The bird leads her to a mound of freshly turned earth, which, when Mary examines it closely, contains a tarnished key that has long been buried. It may, Mary thinks, be the key to the secret garden


She looked at the key quite a long time.  She turned it over and over,
and thought about it.  As I have said before, she was not a child who
had been trained to ask permission or consult her elders about things.
All she thought about the key was that if it was the key to the closed
garden, and she could find out where the door was, she could perhaps
open it and see what was inside the walls, and what had happened to the
old rose-trees. It was because it had been shut up so long that she
wanted to see it.  It seemed as if it must be different from other
places and that something strange must have happened to it during ten
years.  Besides that, if she liked it she could go into it every day
and shut the door behind her, and she could make up some play of her
own and play it quite alone, because nobody would ever know where she
was, but would think the door was still locked and the key buried in
the earth.  The thought of that pleased her very much.

Living as it were, all by herself in a house with a hundred
mysteriously closed rooms and having nothing whatever to do to amuse
herself, had set her inactive brain to working and was actually
awakening her imagination.  There is no doubt that the fresh, strong,
pure air from the moor had a great deal to do with it.  Just as it had
given her an appetite, and fighting with the wind had stirred her
blood, so the same things had stirred her mind.  In India she had
always been too hot and languid and weak to care much about anything,
but in this place she was beginning to care and to want to do new
things.  Already she felt less "contrary," though she did not know why.

She put the key in her pocket and walked up and down her walk.  No one
but herself ever seemed to come there, so she could walk slowly and
look at the wall, or, rather, at the ivy growing on it.  The ivy was
the baffling thing.  Howsoever carefully she looked she could see
nothing but thickly growing, glossy, dark green leaves.  She was very
much disappointed.  Something of her contrariness came back to her as
she paced the walk and looked over it at the tree-tops inside.  It
seemed so silly, she said to herself, to be near it and not be able to
get in.  She took the key in her pocket when she went back to the
house, and she made up her mind that she would always carry it with her
when she went out, so that if she ever should find the hidden door she
would be ready.

Mrs. Medlock had allowed Martha to sleep all night at the cottage, but
she was back at her work in the morning with cheeks redder than ever
and in the best of spirits.

"I got up at four o'clock," she said.  "Eh! it was pretty on th' moor
with th' birds gettin' up an' th' rabbits scamperin' about an' th' sun
risin'. I didn't walk all th' way.  A man gave me a ride in his cart
an' I did enjoy myself."

She was full of stories of the delights of her day out.  Her mother had
been glad to see her and they had got the baking and washing all out of
the way.  She had even made each of the children a doughcake with a bit
of brown sugar in it.

"I had 'em all pipin' hot when they came in from playin' on th' moor.
An' th' cottage all smelt o' nice, clean hot bakin' an' there was a
good fire, an' they just shouted for joy.  Our Dickon he said our
cottage was good enough for a king."

In the evening they had all sat round the fire, and Martha and her
mother had sewed patches on torn clothes and mended stockings and
Martha had told them about the little girl who had come from India and
who had been waited on all her life by what Martha called "blacks"
until she didn't know how to put on her own stockings.

"Eh! they did like to hear about you," said Martha.  "They wanted to
know all about th' blacks an' about th' ship you came in.  I couldn't
tell 'em enough."

Mary reflected a little.

"I'll tell you a great deal more before your next day out," she said,
"so that you will have more to talk about.  I dare say they would like
to hear about riding on elephants and camels, and about the officers
going to hunt tigers."

"My word!" cried delighted Martha.  "It would set 'em clean off their
heads.  Would tha' really do that, Miss? It would be same as a wild
beast show like we heard they had in York once."

"India is quite different from Yorkshire," Mary said slowly, as she
thought the matter over.  "I never thought of that.  Did Dickon and
your mother like to hear you talk about me?"

"Why, our Dickon's eyes nearly started out o' his head, they got that
round," answered Martha.  "But mother, she was put out about your
seemin' to be all by yourself like.  She said, 'Hasn't Mr. Craven got
no governess for her, nor no nurse?' and I said, 'No, he hasn't, though
Mrs. Medlock says he will when he thinks of it, but she says he mayn't
think of it for two or three years.'"

"I don't want a governess," said Mary sharply.

"But mother says you ought to be learnin' your book by this time an'
you ought to have a woman to look after you, an' she says: 'Now,
Martha, you just think how you'd feel yourself, in a big place like
that, wanderin' about all alone, an' no mother.  You do your best to
cheer her up,' she says, an' I said I would."

Mary gave her a long, steady look.

"You do cheer me up," she said.  "I like to hear you talk."

Presently Martha went out of the room and came back with something held
in her hands under her apron.

"What does tha' think," she said, with a cheerful grin.  "I've brought
thee a present."

"A present!" exclaimed Mistress Mary.  How could a cottage full of
fourteen hungry people give any one a present!

"A man was drivin' across the moor peddlin'," Martha explained.  "An'
he stopped his cart at our door.  He had pots an' pans an' odds an'
ends, but mother had no money to buy anythin'. Just as he was goin'
away our 'Lizabeth Ellen called out, 'Mother, he's got skippin'-ropes
with red an' blue handles.' An' mother she calls out quite sudden,
'Here, stop, mister! How much are they?' An' he says 'Tuppence', an'
mother she began fumblin' in her pocket an' she says to me, 'Martha,
tha's brought me thy wages like a good lass, an' I've got four places
to put every penny, but I'm just goin' to take tuppence out of it to
buy that child a skippin'-rope,' an' she bought one an' here it is."

She brought it out from under her apron and exhibited it quite proudly.
It was a strong, slender rope with a striped red and blue handle at
each end, but Mary Lennox had never seen a skipping-rope before.  She
gazed at it with a mystified expression.

"What is it for?" she asked curiously.

"For!" cried out Martha.  "Does tha' mean that they've not got
skippin'-ropes in India, for all they've got elephants and tigers and
camels! No wonder most of 'em's black.  This is what it's for; just
watch me."

And she ran into the middle of the room and, taking a handle in each
hand, began to skip, and skip, and skip, while Mary turned in her chair
to stare at her, and the queer faces in the old portraits seemed to
stare at her, too, and wonder what on earth this common little cottager
had the impudence to be doing under their very noses.  But Martha did
not even see them.  The interest and curiosity in Mistress Mary's face
delighted her, and she went on skipping and counted as she skipped
until she had reached a hundred.

"I could skip longer than that," she said when she stopped.  "I've
skipped as much as five hundred when I was twelve, but I wasn't as fat
then as I am now, an' I was in practice."

Mary got up from her chair beginning to feel excited herself.

"It looks nice," she said.  "Your mother is a kind woman.  Do you think
I could ever skip like that?"

"You just try it," urged Martha, handing her the skipping-rope.  "You
can't skip a hundred at first, but if you practice you'll mount up.
That's what mother said.  She says, 'Nothin' will do her more good than
skippin' rope.  It's th' sensiblest toy a child can have.  Let her play
out in th' fresh air skippin' an' it'll stretch her legs an' arms an'
give her some strength in 'em.'"

It was plain that there was not a great deal of strength in Mistress
Mary's arms and legs when she first began to skip.  She was not very
clever at it, but she liked it so much that she did not want to stop.

"Put on tha' things and run an' skip out o' doors," said Martha.
"Mother said I must tell you to keep out o' doors as much as you could,
even when it rains a bit, so as tha' wrap up warm."

Mary put on her coat and hat and took her skipping-rope over her arm.
She opened the door to go out, and then suddenly thought of something
and turned back rather slowly.

"Martha," she said, "they were your wages.  It was your two-pence
really.  Thank you." She said it stiffly because she was not used to
thanking people or noticing that they did things for her.  "Thank you,"
she said, and held out her hand because she did not know what else to
do.

Martha gave her hand a clumsy little shake, as if she was not
accustomed to this sort of thing either.  Then she laughed.

"Eh! th' art a queer, old-womanish thing," she said.  "If tha'd been
our 'Lizabeth Ellen tha'd have given me a kiss."

Mary looked stiffer than ever.

"Do you want me to kiss you?"

Martha laughed again.

"Nay, not me," she answered.  "If tha' was different, p'raps tha'd want
to thysel'. But tha' isn't. Run off outside an' play with thy rope."

Mistress Mary felt a little awkward as she went out of the room.
Yorkshire people seemed strange, and Martha was always rather a puzzle
to her.  At first she had disliked her very much, but now she did not.
The skipping-rope was a wonderful thing.  She counted and skipped, and
skipped and counted, until her cheeks were quite red, and she was more
interested than she had ever been since she was born.  The sun was
shining and a little wind was blowing--not a rough wind, but one which
came in delightful little gusts and brought a fresh scent of newly
turned earth with it.  She skipped round the fountain garden, and up
one walk and down another.  She skipped at last into the kitchen-garden
and saw Ben Weatherstaff digging and talking to his robin, which was
hopping about him.  She skipped down the walk toward him and he lifted
his head and looked at her with a curious expression.  She had wondered
if he would notice her.  She wanted him to see her skip.

"Well!" he exclaimed.  "Upon my word.  P'raps tha' art a young 'un,
after all, an' p'raps tha's got child's blood in thy veins instead of
sour buttermilk.  Tha's skipped red into thy cheeks as sure as my
name's Ben Weatherstaff.  I wouldn't have believed tha' could do it."

"I never skipped before," Mary said.  "I'm just beginning.  I can only
go up to twenty."

"Tha' keep on," said Ben.  "Tha' shapes well enough at it for a young
'un that's lived with heathen.  Just see how he's watchin' thee,"
jerking his head toward the robin.  "He followed after thee yesterday.
He'll be at it again today.  He'll be bound to find out what th'
skippin'-rope is.  He's never seen one.  Eh!" shaking his head at the
bird, "tha' curiosity will be th' death of thee sometime if tha'
doesn't look sharp."

Mary skipped round all the gardens and round the orchard, resting every
few minutes.  At length she went to her own special walk and made up
her mind to try if she could skip the whole length of it.  It was a
good long skip and she began slowly, but before she had gone half-way
down the path she was so hot and breathless that she was obliged to
stop.  She did not mind much, because she had already counted up to
thirty.  She stopped with a little laugh of pleasure, and there, lo and
behold, was the robin swaying on a long branch of ivy.  He had followed
her and he greeted her with a chirp.  As Mary had skipped toward him
she felt something heavy in her pocket strike against her at each jump,
and when she saw the robin she laughed again.

"You showed me where the key was yesterday," she said.  "You ought to
show me the door today; but I don't believe you know!"

The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall
and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill, merely to show
off.  Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when
he shows off--and they are nearly always doing it.

Mary Lennox had heard a great deal about Magic in her Ayah's stories,
and she always said that what happened almost at that moment was Magic.

One of the nice little gusts of wind rushed down the walk, and it was a
stronger one than the rest.  It was strong enough to wave the branches
of the trees, and it was more than strong enough to sway the trailing
sprays of untrimmed ivy hanging from the wall.  Mary had stepped close
to the robin, and suddenly the gust of wind swung aside some loose ivy
trails, and more suddenly still she jumped toward it and caught it in
her hand.  This she did because she had seen something under it--a
round knob which had been covered by the leaves hanging over it.  It
was the knob of a door.

She put her hands under the leaves and began to pull and push them
aside.  Thick as the ivy hung, it nearly all was a loose and swinging
curtain, though some had crept over wood and iron.  Mary's heart began
to thump and her hands to shake a little in her delight and excitement.
The robin kept singing and twittering away and tilting his head on one
side, as if he were as excited as she was.  What was this under her
hands which was square and made of iron and which her fingers found a
hole in?

It was the lock of the door which had been closed ten years and she put
her hand in her pocket, drew out the key and found it fitted the
keyhole.  She put the key in and turned it.  It took two hands to do
it, but it did turn.

And then she took a long breath and looked behind her up the long walk
to see if any one was coming.  No one was coming.  No one ever did
come, it seemed, and she took another long breath, because she could
not help it, and she held back the swinging curtain of ivy and pushed
back the door which opened slowly--slowly.

Then she slipped through it, and shut it behind her, and stood with her
back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with
excitement, and wonder, and delight.

She was standing inside the secret garden.

Mary determines to search for the door of the secret garden. She desperately wishes to find the garden because it has been locked for so long--if she could only go inside, she thinks, she could invent her own games and play them there alone, and no one would ever know where she was, nor how and where to find her. It is this thought that so compels her. That Mary is compelled at all, by anything, signals quite a change in her character, since she had always been entirely passive during her life in India. At Misselthwaite, in the fresh air of the moor, she is beginning to be involved in the world around her, and her imagination is reviving. Though Mary closely examines the thick ivy that grows upon the stone walls of the garden, she cannot find the door, and, at length, returns to the manor. There, Martha announces that her family was thoroughly spellbound by her stories of the child from India. In fact, Martha's mother is terribly concerned about Mary, and has sent her a skipping rope as a present. Though she is grateful for the gift , Mary does not quite know how to thank Martha for it. She is very formal, shaking Martha's hand rather than kissing her, as it is more common for a child to do. Mary goes out into the garden to practice with the skipping rope, and there runs into Ben Weatherstaff and the robin. As Mary is skipping down the path with the robin beside her, a gust of wind disturbs some of the ivy growing upon the stone wall. Beneath the ivy is a door, which Mary unlocks with the key she unearthed the day before. She finds herself standing inside the secret garden.

This section is largely given over to the idea of rebirth. This rebirth takes two forms: the first coming of the spring to the moor, and Mary's first entrance into the secret garden. Both of these events contribute to Mary's own rebirth: she is quickening, coming alive, due to the healing properties of the moor. Just as the landscape is coming awake at the advent of spring, Mary will as well; the natural environment and its inhabitants are again shown to be in harmony. Nature itself, in the form of the robin redbreast and the "magical" gust of wind that blows the ivy away from the door, seems to approve of and conspire with Mary's wish to enter the secret garden. The robin, who was born in the secret garden, is thus an agent of both its and Mary's eventual "unlocking. Another important agent of Mary's rebirth can be found in the Sowerby family: the housemaid Martha, Dickon, and their mother, Susan. These people, as a result of their poverty and simplicity, are represented as being part of the moor in a way the residents of the manor can never be. Due to their lack of refinement and education, they are believed to be closer to the purity of nature. Susan Sowerby's ability to bear numerous children is one subtle indication of her closesness to nature, as is Dickon's unique sympathy with the animals of the moor. Mary's affection for them therefore emerges out of her affection for the moor. The gift of the jump rope provides an example of Mrs. Sowerby's singular motherliness: it functions almost as an act of adoption, in that she has concerned herself with Mary's welfare almost as if Mary were her own child. The gift also, however, reintroduces the specter of racism to Mary's relationship with the Sowerbys. Both Martha and Ben Weatherstaff speak of the rope as a uniquely English toy, one that will rid Mary of her last traces of "Indianness. Martha, in fact, says, "They've not got skipping-ropes in India. No wonder most of em's black. India's "blackness" and godlessness are once again denounced as unfit for an English child like Mary. The skipping rope will both make her stronger and more like the people of the moor: it will bring her back to her innate Englishness, and to the strength of that position


It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could
imagine.  The high walls which shut it in were covered with the
leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were
matted together.  Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen
a great many roses in India.  All the ground was covered with grass of
a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely
rosebushes if they were alive.  There were numbers of standard roses
which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees.
There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made
the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run
all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying
curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a
far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made
lovely bridges of themselves.  There were neither leaves nor roses on
them now and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but
their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy
mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown
grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the
ground.  It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all
look so mysterious.  Mary had thought it must be different from other
gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed
it was different from any other place she had ever seen in her life.

"How still it is!" she whispered.  "How still!"

Then she waited a moment and listened at the stillness.  The robin, who
had flown to his treetop, was still as all the rest.  He did not even
flutter his wings; he sat without stirring, and looked at Mary.

"No wonder it is still," she whispered again.  "I am the first person
who has spoken in here for ten years."

She moved away from the door, stepping as softly as if she were afraid
of awakening some one.  She was glad that there was grass under her
feet and that her steps made no sounds.  She walked under one of the
fairy-like gray arches between the trees and looked up at the sprays
and tendrils which formed them.  "I wonder if they are all quite dead,"
she said.  "Is it all a quite dead garden? I wish it wasn't."

If she had been Ben Weatherstaff she could have told whether the wood
was alive by looking at it, but she could only see that there were only
gray or brown sprays and branches and none showed any signs of even a
tiny leaf-bud anywhere.

But she was inside the wonderful garden and she could come through the
door under the ivy any time and she felt as if she had found a world
all her own.

The sun was shining inside the four walls and the high arch of blue sky
over this particular piece of Misselthwaite seemed even more brilliant
and soft than it was over the moor.  The robin flew down from his
tree-top and hopped about or flew after her from one bush to another.
He chirped a good deal and had a very busy air, as if he were showing
her things.  Everything was strange and silent and she seemed to be
hundreds of miles away from any one, but somehow she did not feel
lonely at all.  All that troubled her was her wish that she knew
whether all the roses were dead, or if perhaps some of them had lived
and might put out leaves and buds as the weather got warmer.  She did
not want it to be a quite dead garden.  If it were a quite alive
garden, how wonderful it would be, and what thousands of roses would
grow on every side!

Her skipping-rope had hung over her arm when she came in and after she
had walked about for a while she thought she would skip round the whole
garden, stopping when she wanted to look at things.  There seemed to
have been grass paths here and there, and in one or two corners there
were alcoves of evergreen with stone seats or tall moss-covered flower
urns in them.

As she came near the second of these alcoves she stopped skipping.
There had once been a flowerbed in it, and she thought she saw
something sticking out of the black earth--some sharp little pale green
points.  She remembered what Ben Weatherstaff had said and she knelt
down to look at them.

"Yes, they are tiny growing things and they might be crocuses or
snowdrops or daffodils," she whispered.

She bent very close to them and sniffed the fresh scent of the damp
earth.  She liked it very much.

"Perhaps there are some other ones coming up in other places," she
said.  "I will go all over the garden and look."

She did not skip, but walked.  She went slowly and kept her eyes on the
ground.  She looked in the old border beds and among the grass, and
after she had gone round, trying to miss nothing, she had found ever so
many more sharp, pale green points, and she had become quite excited
again.

"It isn't a quite dead garden," she cried out softly to herself.  "Even
if the roses are dead, there are other things alive."

She did not know anything about gardening, but the grass seemed so
thick in some of the places where the green points were pushing their
way through that she thought they did not seem to have room enough to
grow.  She searched about until she found a rather sharp piece of wood
and knelt down and dug and weeded out the weeds and grass until she
made nice little clear places around them.

"Now they look as if they could breathe," she said, after she had
finished with the first ones.  "I am going to do ever so many more.
I'll do all I can see.  If I haven't time today I can come tomorrow."

She went from place to place, and dug and weeded, and enjoyed herself
so immensely that she was led on from bed to bed and into the grass
under the trees.  The exercise made her so warm that she first threw
her coat off, and then her hat, and without knowing it she was smiling
down on to the grass and the pale green points all the time.

The robin was tremendously busy.  He was very much pleased to see
gardening begun on his own estate.  He had often wondered at Ben
Weatherstaff.  Where gardening is done all sorts of delightful things
to eat are turned up with the soil.  Now here was this new kind of
creature who was not half Ben's size and yet had had the sense to come
into his garden and begin at once.

Mistress Mary worked in her garden until it was time to go to her
midday dinner.  In fact, she was rather late in remembering, and when
she put on her coat and hat, and picked up her skipping-rope, she could
not believe that she had been working two or three hours.  She had been
actually happy all the time; and dozens and dozens of the tiny, pale
green points were to be seen in cleared places, looking twice as
cheerful as they had looked before when the grass and weeds had been
smothering them.

"I shall come back this afternoon," she said, looking all round at her
new kingdom, and speaking to the trees and the rose-bushes as if they
heard her.

Then she ran lightly across the grass, pushed open the slow old door
and slipped through it under the ivy.  She had such red cheeks and such
bright eyes and ate such a dinner that Martha was delighted.

"Two pieces o' meat an' two helps o' rice puddin'!" she said.  "Eh!
mother will be pleased when I tell her what th' skippin'-rope's done
for thee."

In the course of her digging with her pointed stick Mistress Mary had
found herself digging up a sort of white root rather like an onion.
She had put it back in its place and patted the earth carefully down on
it and just now she wondered if Martha could tell her what it was.

"Martha," she said, "what are those white roots that look like onions?"

"They're bulbs," answered Martha.  "Lots o' spring flowers grow from
'em. Th' very little ones are snowdrops an' crocuses an' th' big ones
are narcissuses an' jonquils and daffydowndillys.  Th' biggest of all
is lilies an' purple flags.  Eh! they are nice.  Dickon's got a whole
lot of 'em planted in our bit o' garden."

"Does Dickon know all about them?" asked Mary, a new idea taking
possession of her.

"Our Dickon can make a flower grow out of a brick walk.  Mother says he
just whispers things out o' th' ground."

"Do bulbs live a long time? Would they live years and years if no one
helped them?" inquired Mary anxiously.

"They're things as helps themselves," said Martha.  "That's why poor
folk can afford to have 'em. If you don't trouble 'em, most of 'em'll
work away underground for a lifetime an' spread out an' have little
'uns. There's a place in th' park woods here where there's snowdrops by
thousands.  They're the prettiest sight in Yorkshire when th' spring
comes.  No one knows when they was first planted."

"I wish the spring was here now," said Mary.  "I want to see all the
things that grow in England."

She had finished her dinner and gone to her favorite seat on the
hearth-rug.

"I wish--I wish I had a little spade," she said.  "Whatever does tha'
want a spade for?" asked Martha, laughing.  "Art tha' goin' to take to
diggin'? I must tell mother that, too."

Mary looked at the fire and pondered a little.  She must be careful if
she meant to keep her secret kingdom.  She wasn't doing any harm, but
if Mr. Craven found out about the open door he would be fearfully angry
and get a new key and lock it up forevermore.  She really could not
bear that.

"This is such a big lonely place," she said slowly, as if she were
turning matters over in her mind.  "The house is lonely, and the park
is lonely, and the gardens are lonely.  So many places seem shut up.  I
never did many things in India, but there were more people to look
at--natives and soldiers marching by--and sometimes bands playing, and
my Ayah told me stories.  There is no one to talk to here except you
and Ben Weatherstaff.  And you have to do your work and Ben
Weatherstaff won't speak to me often.  I thought if I had a little
spade I could dig somewhere as he does, and I might make a little
garden if he would give me some seeds."

Martha's face quite lighted up.

"There now!" she exclaimed, "if that wasn't one of th' things mother
said.  She says, 'There's such a lot o' room in that big place, why
don't they give her a bit for herself, even if she doesn't plant
nothin' but parsley an' radishes? She'd dig an' rake away an' be right
down happy over it.' Them was the very words she said."

"Were they?" said Mary.  "How many things she knows, doesn't she?"

"Eh!" said Martha.  "It's like she says: 'A woman as brings up twelve
children learns something besides her A B C. Children's as good as
'rithmetic to set you findin' out things.'"

"How much would a spade cost--a little one?" Mary asked.

"Well," was Martha's reflective answer, "at Thwaite village there's a
shop or so an' I saw little garden sets with a spade an' a rake an' a
fork all tied together for two shillings.  An' they was stout enough to
work with, too."

"I've got more than that in my purse," said Mary.  "Mrs. Morrison gave
me five shillings and Mrs. Medlock gave me some money from Mr. Craven."

"Did he remember thee that much?" exclaimed Martha.

"Mrs. Medlock said I was to have a shilling a week to spend.  She gives
me one every Saturday.  I didn't know what to spend it on."

"My word! that's riches," said Martha.  "Tha' can buy anything in th'
world tha' wants.  Th' rent of our cottage is only one an' threepence
an' it's like pullin' eye-teeth to get it.  Now I've just thought of
somethin'," putting her hands on her hips.

"What?" said Mary eagerly.

"In the shop at Thwaite they sell packages o' flower-seeds for a penny
each, and our Dickon he knows which is th' prettiest ones an' how to
make 'em grow.  He walks over to Thwaite many a day just for th' fun of
it.  Does tha' know how to print letters?" suddenly.

"I know how to write," Mary answered.

Martha shook her head.

"Our Dickon can only read printin'. If tha' could print we could write
a letter to him an' ask him to go an' buy th' garden tools an' th'
seeds at th' same time."

"Oh! you're a good girl!" Mary cried.  "You are, really! I didn't know
you were so nice.  I know I can print letters if I try.  Let's ask Mrs.
Medlock for a pen and ink and some paper."

"I've got some of my own," said Martha.  "I bought 'em so I could print
a bit of a letter to mother of a Sunday.  I'll go and get it." She ran
out of the room, and Mary stood by the fire and twisted her thin little
hands together with sheer pleasure.

"If I have a spade," she whispered, "I can make the earth nice and soft
and dig up weeds.  If I have seeds and can make flowers grow the garden
won't be dead at all--it will come alive."

She did not go out again that afternoon because when Martha returned
with her pen and ink and paper she was obliged to clear the table and
carry the plates and dishes downstairs and when she got into the
kitchen Mrs. Medlock was there and told her to do something, so Mary
waited for what seemed to her a long time before she came back.  Then
it was a serious piece of work to write to Dickon.  Mary had been
taught very little because her governesses had disliked her too much to
stay with her.  She could not spell particularly well but she found
that she could print letters when she tried.  This was the letter
Martha dictated to her: "My Dear Dickon:

This comes hoping to find you well as it leaves me at present.  Miss
Mary has plenty of money and will you go to Thwaite and buy her some
flower seeds and a set of garden tools to make a flower-bed. Pick the
prettiest ones and easy to grow because she has never done it before
and lived in India which is different.  Give my love to mother and
every one of you.  Miss Mary is going to tell me a lot more so that on
my next day out you can hear about elephants and camels and gentlemen
going hunting lions and tigers.

                     "Your loving sister,
                     Martha Phoebe Sowerby."

"We'll put the money in th' envelope an' I'll get th' butcher boy to
take it in his cart.  He's a great friend o' Dickon's," said Martha.

"How shall I get the things when Dickon buys them?"

"He'll bring 'em to you himself.  He'll like to walk over this way."

"Oh!" exclaimed Mary, "then I shall see him! I never thought I should
see Dickon."

"Does tha' want to see him?" asked Martha suddenly, for Mary had looked
so pleased.

"Yes, I do.  I never saw a boy foxes and crows loved.  I want to see
him very much."

Martha gave a little start, as if she remembered something.  "Now to
think," she broke out, "to think o' me forgettin' that there; an' I
thought I was goin' to tell you first thing this mornin'. I asked
mother--and she said she'd ask Mrs. Medlock her own self."

"Do you mean--" Mary began.

"What I said Tuesday.  Ask her if you might be driven over to our
cottage some day and have a bit o' mother's hot oat cake, an' butter,
an' a glass o' milk."

It seemed as if all the interesting things were happening in one day.
To think of going over the moor in the daylight and when the sky was
blue! To think of going into the cottage which held twelve children!

"Does she think Mrs. Medlock would let me go?" she asked, quite
anxiously.

"Aye, she thinks she would.  She knows what a tidy woman mother is and
how clean she keeps the cottage."

"If I went I should see your mother as well as Dickon," said Mary,
thinking it over and liking the idea very much.  "She doesn't seem to
be like the mothers in India."

Her work in the garden and the excitement of the afternoon ended by
making her feel quiet and thoughtful.  Martha stayed with her until
tea-time, but they sat in comfortable quiet and talked very little.
But just before Martha went downstairs for the tea-tray, Mary asked a
question.

"Martha," she said, "has the scullery-maid had the toothache again
today?"

Martha certainly started slightly.

"What makes thee ask that?" she said.

"Because when I waited so long for you to come back I opened the door
and walked down the corridor to see if you were coming.  And I heard
that far-off crying again, just as we heard it the other night.  There
isn't a wind today, so you see it couldn't have been the wind."

"Eh!" said Martha restlessly.  "Tha' mustn't go walkin' about in
corridors an' listenin'. Mr. Craven would be that there angry there's
no knowin' what he'd do."

"I wasn't listening," said Mary.  "I was just waiting for you--and I
heard it.  That's three times."

"My word! There's Mrs. Medlock's bell," said Martha, and she almost ran
out of the room.

"It's the strangest house any one ever lived in," said Mary drowsily,
as she dropped her head on the cushioned seat of the armchair near her.
Fresh air, and digging, and skipping-rope had made her feel so
comfortably tired that she fell asleep.

Inside the secret garden, Mary finds a great many rosebushes, and standard roses that have been allowed to grow as large as trees; the flowerless vines of climbing roses have overgrown all else, and make lovely curtains in the air. It is a strange and silent place, for no one has entered it for ten years; Mary thinks it must be very different from gardens that have not been so abandoned. Since it is winter, everything in the garden has gone brown or gray, and Mary cannot be certain whether the flora are dead or alive. She fiercely hopes that everything in the garden has not died. Mary feels that the garden is "a world all her own," and that there might be no one at all alive for hundred of miles--and yet she is not lonely while she is there. She finds a few green shoots pushing up through the earth, eager for spring. Mary is quite thrilled at the thought that something is still living in the garden, and sets about weeding the space around these early flowers, so that they might grow more quickly. She occupies herself with this weeding all day. That night, at the manor, Mary asks Martha for tools to help her in gardening. Martha tells Mary to write a letter to Dickon: he would certainly agree to buy tools and flower seeds on one of his trips to Thwaite, the village nearby. Mary writes the letter, and is very excited by the idea that Dickon will bring the supplies to her himself--she had never expected to see the boy whom even the animals adore. Martha also mentions that her mother has agreed to have Mary visit the cottage, and Mary realizes that she is eager to meet her as well, for "She doesn't seem to be like the mothers in India." When Martha briefly steps out of the room, Mary hears the same far-off crying as she did during the storm. Martha again refuses to admit that she too hears the sound, and flees the room to avoid answering Mary's questions.

The secret garden has the same fairy-tale quality that permeates the rest of the novel. The flowers within it have grown into "curtains," as if guided by an innate intelligence; the word "curtains" suggests both the veiling of a mystery  and, contradictorily, the placement of the garden on a stage of its own making. This symbolizes the garden's new status as an "open secret," one that Mary now knows. The secret garden, at this point in the novel, is strongly aligned with both Mary and the late Mistress Craven. Mary is ten years old, and the garden has been closed for ten years. Up to the moment that she steps foot into the garden, Mary too is closed off--she has loved no one, and has been utterly unloved. Because it has been so long since anyone has tended the garden, it is impossible to determine whether its flowers are dead or alive. Similarly, Mary has had no one to care for her since her birth, and has become waxen  and standoffish as a result. No one is sure whether she is really a little girl at all; Ben Weatherstaff, Martha, and Mrs. Medlock all refer to her as an "old woman." Since Mary and the garden are so closely symbolically related, the reader realizes that the reawakening of the garden may foreshadow and effect Mary's own reawakening. This implication is strengthened by Mary's tending of the living green shoots in the garden. Though she knows nothing about gardening, she clears space around them because it seems that "they do not have enough room to  grow"; this description can be likened to Mary's own experience of being moved from India to the wide-open spaces of the moor. She, too, has been given room to breathe. Her tending of the green shoots also recalls the play- gardening she did in India; now, instead of sand and cut flowers that have no hope of thriving, Mary has been given living plants in a real garden. Once again, England is aligned with life and wakefulness, and India with death and sleep. Mary is instantly concerned for the garden's well-being; she thinks, "She did not want it to be a quite dead garden. If it were a quite alive garden, how wonderful it would be, and what thousands of roses would grow on every side!" The roses are Mistress Craven's personal symbol; they are mentioned whenever she is mentioned. The garden is still flooded with rose-trees and rosebushes, though none are in bloom; Mary remarks to herself, "Even if the roses are dead, there are other things alive." This, along with the quote above, indicates that the reawakening of the garden may bring the spirit of Mistress Craven back to it - she exists wherever roses are in bloom. At the same time, this passage subtly condemns Master Craven for letting the garden fall into ruin in the first place: even if his wife is dead, life must still go on. This notion becomes extremely important in later chapters, after the introduction of Colin Craven. This chapter also foreshadows the crucial role Dickon will play in the rebirth of both Mary and the secret garden: it is Dickon who will bring her the tools and seeds that she requires to make the garden "come alive."


The sun shone down for nearly a week on the secret garden.  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.  She was beginning
to like to be out of doors; she no longer hated the wind, but enjoyed
it.  She could run faster, and longer, and she could skip up to a
hundred.  The bulbs in the secret garden must have been much
astonished.  Such nice clear places were made round them that they had
all the breathing space they wanted, and really, if Mistress Mary had
known it, they began to cheer up under the dark earth and work
tremendously.  The sun could get at them and warm them, and when the
rain came down it could reach them at once, so they began to feel very
much alive.

Mary was an odd, determined little person, and now she had something
interesting to be determined about, she was very much absorbed, indeed.
She worked and dug and pulled up weeds steadily, only becoming more
pleased with her work every hour instead of tiring of it.  It seemed to
her like a fascinating sort of play.  She found many more of the
sprouting pale green points than she had ever hoped to find.  They
seemed to be starting up everywhere and each day she was sure she found
tiny new ones, some so tiny that they barely peeped above the earth.
There were so many that she remembered what Martha had said about the
"snowdrops by the thousands," and about bulbs spreading and making new
ones.  These had been left to themselves for ten years and perhaps they
had spread, like the snowdrops, into thousands.  She wondered how long
it would be before they showed that they were flowers.  Sometimes she
stopped digging to look at the garden and try to imagine what it would
be like when it was covered with thousands of lovely things in bloom.
During that week of sunshine, she became more intimate with Ben
Weatherstaff.  She surprised him several times by seeming to start up
beside him as if she sprang out of the earth.  The truth was that she
was afraid that he would pick up his tools and go away if he saw her
coming, so she always walked toward him as silently as possible.  But,
in fact, he did not object to her as strongly as he had at first.
Perhaps he was secretly rather flattered by her evident desire for his
elderly company.  Then, also, she was more civil than she had been.  He
did not know that when she first saw him she spoke to him as she would
have spoken to a native, and had not known that a cross, sturdy old
Yorkshire man was not accustomed to salaam to his masters, and be
merely commanded by them to do things.

"Tha'rt like th' robin," he said to her one morning when he lifted his
head and saw her standing by him.  "I never knows when I shall see thee
or which side tha'll come from."

"He's friends with me now," said Mary.

"That's like him," snapped Ben Weatherstaff.  "Makin' up to th' women
folk just for vanity an' flightiness.  There's nothin' he wouldn't do
for th' sake o' showin' off an' flirtin' his tail-feathers. He's as
full o' pride as an egg's full o' meat."

He very seldom talked much and sometimes did not even answer Mary's
questions except by a grunt, but this morning he said more than usual.
He stood up and rested one hobnailed boot on the top of his spade while
he looked her over.

"How long has tha' been here?" he jerked out.

"I think it's about a month," she answered.

"Tha's beginnin' to do Misselthwaite credit," he said.  "Tha's a bit
fatter than tha' was an' tha's not quite so yeller.  Tha' looked like a
young plucked crow when tha' first came into this garden.  Thinks I to
myself I never set eyes on an uglier, sourer faced young 'un."

Mary was not vain and as she had never thought much of her looks she
was not greatly disturbed.

"I know I'm fatter," she said.  "My stockings are getting tighter.
They used to make wrinkles.  There's the robin, Ben Weatherstaff."

There, indeed, was the robin, and she thought he looked nicer than
ever.  His red waistcoat was as glossy as satin and he flirted his
wings and tail and tilted his head and hopped about with all sorts of
lively graces.  He seemed determined to make Ben Weatherstaff admire
him.  But Ben was sarcastic.

"Aye, there tha' art!" he said.  "Tha' can put up with me for a bit
sometimes when tha's got no one better.  Tha's been reddenin' up thy
waistcoat an' polishin' thy feathers this two weeks.  I know what tha's
up to.  Tha's courtin' some bold young madam somewhere tellin' thy lies
to her about bein' th' finest cock robin on Missel Moor an' ready to
fight all th' rest of 'em."

"Oh! look at him!" exclaimed Mary.

The robin was evidently in a fascinating, bold mood.  He hopped closer
and closer and looked at Ben Weatherstaff more and more engagingly.  He
flew on to the nearest currant bush and tilted his head and sang a
little song right at him.

"Tha' thinks tha'll get over me by doin' that," said Ben, wrinkling his
face up in such a way that Mary felt sure he was trying not to look
pleased.  "Tha' thinks no one can stand out against thee--that's what
tha' thinks."

The robin spread his wings--Mary could scarcely believe her eyes.  He
flew right up to the handle of Ben Weatherstaff's spade and alighted on
the top of it.  Then the old man's face wrinkled itself slowly into a
new expression.  He stood still as if he were afraid to breathe--as if
he would not have stirred for the world, lest his robin should start
away.  He spoke quite in a whisper.

"Well, I'm danged!" he said as softly as if he were saying something
quite different.  "Tha' does know how to get at a chap--tha' does!
Tha's fair unearthly, tha's so knowin'."

And he stood without stirring--almost without drawing his breath--until
the robin gave another flirt to his wings and flew away.  Then he stood
looking at the handle of the spade as if there might be Magic in it,
and then he began to dig again and said nothing for several minutes.

But because he kept breaking into a slow grin now and then, Mary was
not afraid to talk to him.

"Have you a garden of your own?" she asked.

"No. I'm bachelder an' lodge with Martin at th' gate."

"If you had one," said Mary, "what would you plant?"

"Cabbages an' 'taters an' onions."

"But if you wanted to make a flower garden," persisted Mary, "what
would you plant?"

"Bulbs an' sweet-smellin' things--but mostly roses."

Mary's face lighted up.

"Do you like roses?" she said.

Ben Weatherstaff rooted up a weed and threw it aside before he answered.

"Well, yes, I do.  I was learned that by a young lady I was gardener
to.  She had a lot in a place she was fond of, an' she loved 'em like
they was children--or robins.  I've seen her bend over an' kiss 'em."
He dragged out another weed and scowled at it.  "That were as much as
ten year' ago."

"Where is she now?" asked Mary, much interested.

"Heaven," he answered, and drove his spade deep into the soil,
"'cording to what parson says."

"What happened to the roses?" Mary asked again, more interested than
ever.

"They was left to themselves."

Mary was becoming quite excited.

"Did they quite die? Do roses quite die when they are left to
themselves?" she ventured.

"Well, I'd got to like 'em--an' I liked her--an' she liked 'em," Ben
Weatherstaff admitted reluctantly.  "Once or twice a year I'd go an'
work at 'em a bit--prune 'em an' dig about th' roots.  They run wild,
but they was in rich soil, so some of 'em lived."

"When they have no leaves and look gray and brown and dry, how can you
tell whether they are dead or alive?" inquired Mary.

"Wait till th' spring gets at 'em--wait till th' sun shines on th' rain
and th' rain falls on th' sunshine an' then tha'll find out."

"How--how?" cried Mary, forgetting to be careful.  "Look along th'
twigs an' branches an' if tha' see a bit of a brown lump swelling here
an' there, watch it after th' warm rain an' see what happens." He
stopped suddenly and looked curiously at her eager face.  "Why does
tha' care so much about roses an' such, all of a sudden?" he demanded.

Mistress Mary felt her face grow red.  She was almost afraid to answer.

"I--I want to play that--that I have a garden of my own," she
stammered.  "I--there is nothing for me to do.  I have nothing--and no
one."

"Well," said Ben Weatherstaff slowly, as he watched her, "that's true.
Tha' hasn't."

He said it in such an odd way that Mary wondered if he was actually a
little sorry for her.  She had never felt sorry for herself; she had
only felt tired and cross, because she disliked people and things so
much.  But now the world seemed to be changing and getting nicer.  If
no one found out about the secret garden, she should enjoy herself
always.

She stayed with him for ten or fifteen minutes longer and asked him as
many questions as she dared.  He answered every one of them in his
queer grunting way and he did not seem really cross and did not pick up
his spade and leave her.  He said something about roses just as she was
going away and it reminded her of the ones he had said he had been fond
of.

"Do you go and see those other roses now?" she asked.

"Not been this year.  My rheumatics has made me too stiff in th'
joints."

He said it in his grumbling voice, and then quite suddenly he seemed to
get angry with her, though she did not see why he should.

"Now look here!" he said sharply.  "Don't tha' ask so many questions.
Tha'rt th' worst wench for askin' questions I've ever come a cross.
Get thee gone an' play thee.  I've done talkin' for today."

And he said it so crossly that she knew there was not the least use in
staying another minute.  She went skipping slowly down the outside
walk, thinking him over and saying to herself that, queer as it was,
here was another person whom she liked in spite of his crossness.  She
liked old Ben Weatherstaff.  Yes, she did like him.  She always wanted
to try to make him talk to her.  Also she began to believe that he knew
everything in the world about flowers.

There was a laurel-hedged walk which curved round the secret garden and
ended at a gate which opened into a wood, in the park.  She thought she
would slip round this walk and look into the wood and see if there were
any rabbits hopping about.  She enjoyed the skipping very much and when
she reached the little gate she opened it and went through because she
heard a low, peculiar whistling sound and wanted to find out what it
was.

It was a very strange thing indeed.  She quite caught her breath as she
stopped to look at it.  A boy was sitting under a tree, with his back
against it, playing on a rough wooden pipe.  He was a funny looking boy
about twelve.  He looked very clean and his nose turned up and his
cheeks were as red as poppies and never had Mistress Mary seen such
round and such blue eyes in any boy's face.  And on the trunk of the
tree he leaned against, a brown squirrel was clinging and watching him,
and from behind a bush nearby a cock pheasant was delicately stretching
his neck to peep out, and quite near him were two rabbits sitting up
and sniffing with tremulous noses--and actually it appeared as if they
were all drawing near to watch him and listen to the strange low little
call his pipe seemed to make.

When he saw Mary he held up his hand and spoke to her in a voice almost
as low as and rather like his piping.

"Don't tha' move," he said.  "It'd flight 'em." Mary remained
motionless.  He stopped playing his pipe and began to rise from the
ground.  He moved so slowly that it scarcely seemed as though he were
moving at all, but at last he stood on his feet and then the squirrel
scampered back up into the branches of his tree, the pheasant withdrew
his head and the rabbits dropped on all fours and began to hop away,
though not at all as if they were frightened.

"I'm Dickon," the boy said.  "I know tha'rt Miss Mary."

Then Mary realized that somehow she had known at first that he was
Dickon.  Who else could have been charming rabbits and pheasants as the
natives charm snakes in India? He had a wide, red, curving mouth and
his smile spread all over his face.

"I got up slow," he explained, "because if tha' makes a quick move it
startles 'em. A body 'as to move gentle an' speak low when wild things
is about."

He did not speak to her as if they had never seen each other before but
as if he knew her quite well.  Mary knew nothing about boys and she
spoke to him a little stiffly because she felt rather shy.

"Did you get Martha's letter?" she asked.

He nodded his curly, rust-colored head.  "That's why I come."

He stooped to pick up something which had been lying on the ground
beside him when he piped.

"I've got th' garden tools.  There's a little spade an' rake an' a fork
an' hoe.  Eh! they are good 'uns. There's a trowel, too.  An' th' woman
in th' shop threw in a packet o' white poppy an' one o' blue larkspur
when I bought th' other seeds."

"Will you show the seeds to me?" Mary said.

She wished she could talk as he did.  His speech was so quick and easy.
It sounded as if he liked her and was not the least afraid she would
not like him, though he was only a common moor boy, in patched clothes
and with a funny face and a rough, rusty-red head.  As she came closer
to him she noticed that there was a clean fresh scent of heather and
grass and leaves about him, almost as if he were made of them.  She
liked it very much and when she looked into his funny face with the red
cheeks and round blue eyes she forgot that she had felt shy.

"Let us sit down on this log and look at them," she said.

They sat down and he took a clumsy little brown paper package out of
his coat pocket.  He untied the string and inside there were ever so
many neater and smaller packages with a picture of a flower on each one.

"There's a lot o' mignonette an' poppies," he said.  "Mignonette's th'
sweetest smellin' thing as grows, an' it'll grow wherever you cast it,
same as poppies will.  Them as'll come up an' bloom if you just whistle
to 'em, them's th' nicest of all." He stopped and turned his head
quickly, his poppy-cheeked face lighting up.

"Where's that robin as is callin' us?" he said.

The chirp came from a thick holly bush, bright with scarlet berries,
and Mary thought she knew whose it was.

"Is it really calling us?" she asked.

"Aye," said Dickon, as if it was the most natural thing in the world,
"he's callin' some one he's friends with.  That's same as sayin' 'Here
I am.  Look at me.  I wants a bit of a chat.' There he is in the bush.
Whose is he?"

"He's Ben Weatherstaff's, but I think he knows me a little," answered
Mary.

"Aye, he knows thee," said Dickon in his low voice again.  "An' he
likes thee.  He's took thee on.  He'll tell me all about thee in a
minute."

He moved quite close to the bush with the slow movement Mary had
noticed before, and then he made a sound almost like the robin's own
twitter.  The robin listened a few seconds, intently, and then answered
quite as if he were replying to a question.

"Aye, he's a friend o' yours," chuckled Dickon.

"Do you think he is?" cried Mary eagerly.  She did so want to know.
"Do you think he really likes me?"

"He wouldn't come near thee if he didn't," answered Dickon.  "Birds is
rare choosers an' a robin can flout a body worse than a man.  See, he's
making up to thee now.  'Cannot tha' see a chap?' he's sayin'."

And it really seemed as if it must be true.  He so sidled and twittered
and tilted as he hopped on his bush.

"Do you understand everything birds say?" said Mary.

Dickon's grin spread until he seemed all wide, red, curving mouth, and
he rubbed his rough head.

"I think I do, and they think I do," he said.  "I've lived on th' moor
with 'em so long.  I've watched 'em break shell an' come out an' fledge
an' learn to fly an' begin to sing, till I think I'm one of 'em.
Sometimes I think p'raps I'm a bird, or a fox, or a rabbit, or a
squirrel, or even a beetle, an' I don't know it."

He laughed and came back to the log and began to talk about the flower
seeds again.  He told her what they looked like when they were flowers;
he told her how to plant them, and watch them, and feed and water them.

"See here," he said suddenly, turning round to look at her.  "I'll
plant them for thee myself.  Where is tha' garden?"

Mary's thin hands clutched each other as they lay on her lap.  She did
not know what to say, so for a whole minute she said nothing.  She had
never thought of this.  She felt miserable.  And she felt as if she
went red and then pale.

"Tha's got a bit o' garden, hasn't tha'?" Dickon said.

It was true that she had turned red and then pale.  Dickon saw her do
it, and as she still said nothing, he began to be puzzled.

"Wouldn't they give thee a bit?" he asked.  "Hasn't tha' got any yet?"

She held her hands tighter and turned her eyes toward him.

"I don't know anything about boys," she said slowly.  "Could you keep a
secret, if I told you one? It's a great secret.  I don't know what I
should do if any one found it out.  I believe I should die!" She said
the last sentence quite fiercely.

Dickon looked more puzzled than ever and even rubbed his hand over his
rough head again, but he answered quite good-humoredly. "I'm keepin'
secrets all th' time," he said.  "If I couldn't keep secrets from th'
other lads, secrets about foxes' cubs, an' birds' nests, an' wild
things' holes, there'd be naught safe on th' moor.  Aye, I can keep
secrets."

Mistress Mary did not mean to put out her hand and clutch his sleeve
but she did it.

"I've stolen a garden," she said very fast.  "It isn't mine.  It isn't
anybody's. Nobody wants it, nobody cares for it, nobody ever goes into
it.  Perhaps everything is dead in it already.  I don't know."

She began to feel hot and as contrary as she had ever felt in her life.

"I don't care, I don't care! Nobody has any right to take it from me
when I care about it and they don't. They're letting it die, all shut
in by itself," she ended passionately, and she threw her arms over her
face and burst out crying-poor little Mistress Mary.

Dickon's curious blue eyes grew rounder and rounder.  "Eh-h-h!" he
said, drawing his exclamation out slowly, and the way he did it meant
both wonder and sympathy.

"I've nothing to do," said Mary.  "Nothing belongs to me.  I found it
myself and I got into it myself.  I was only just like the robin, and
they wouldn't take it from the robin." "Where is it?" asked Dickon in a
dropped voice.

Mistress Mary got up from the log at once.  She knew she felt contrary
again, and obstinate, and she did not care at all.  She was imperious
and Indian, and at the same time hot and sorrowful.

"Come with me and I'll show you," she said.

She led him round the laurel path and to the walk where the ivy grew so
thickly.  Dickon followed her with a queer, almost pitying, look on his
face.  He felt as if he were being led to look at some strange bird's
nest and must move softly.  When she stepped to the wall and lifted the
hanging ivy he started.  There was a door and Mary pushed it slowly
open and they passed in together, and then Mary stood and waved her
hand round defiantly.

"It's this," she said.  "It's a secret garden, and I'm the only one in
the world who wants it to be alive."

Dickon looked round and round about it, and round and round again.

"Eh!" he almost whispered, "it is a queer, pretty place!  It's like as
if a body was in a dream."

In the week after her first entry beyond its walls, Mary comes to think of the secret garden as a "fairy-tale sort of place"--as a place that is magical and strange and all her own. Each day, she plays with her skipping-rope and digs and weeds in the garden, in an effort to cultivate the few plants she knows to be alive. Mary is becoming healthier, and less contrary, and more engaged in the world with each day that she passes at Misselthwaite. During this time, her acquaintance with Ben Weatherstaff develops into friendship, and Mary attempts to covertly ask him for advice on gardening. Ben Weatherstaff tells her that he once tended the garden of a woman who "loved like they was children or robins," and, though she died, he still cares for her roses once or twice a year. Mary asks him if roses die when they are left to themselves, and how one might determine if they are dead or alive. Ben replies that one must wait till spring to know for certain. She continues questioning him about his work with the abandoned roses until he becomes unaccountably angry with her and walks off once again. After this encounter, Mary follows one of the laurel-paths into the woods in search of rabbits. She hears an odd whistling sound and, following it, comes upon a boy playing a wooden pipe beneath one of the trees. The boy is surrounded by animals-a pheasant, a squirrel, two rabbits-and Mary knows him almost immediately as Dickon Sowerby, the famous animal-charmer. She is thrilled to see him, but, as she is not used to boys, initially feels rather shy in his company. Dickon tells Mary that he received Martha's letter, and gives her the gardening tools and seeds that she had asked him to buy. Mary is very taken with the ease of Dickon's Yorkshire speech, as well as with his ruddy looks and patchwork clothing; to her, there is "a clean fresh scent of heather and grass and leaves about him, as if he were made of them. Thinking of this, Mary is suddenly and completely at ease with him, and forgets her shyness. After a few moments, the robin redbreast joins the pair beneath the tree. The boy appears to speak to the bird in robin-language, asking if he is a friend of Mary's. Dickon explains to Mary how to tend the seeds he has brought her, and then asks to see the place where she intends to plant them, as he wishes to help. Mary is extremely anxious about sharing the secret of the garden with him. Dickon tells her that she needn't mistrust him, for he keeps such secrets all the time, to protect his wild things from the violence of other boys. Mary says that she has "stolen a garden," but fiercely proclaims that it is hers, and she will not surrender it. She does, however, want Dickon to see it, and so leads him there