THE SECRET GARDEN
BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
CHAPTER PAGE
I There is No One Left
II Mistress Mary Quite Contrary
III Across the Moor
IV Martha
V The Cry in the Corridor
VI “There Was Some One Crying – There Was!”
VII The Key of the Garden
VIII The Robin Who Showed the Way
IX The Strangest House Any One Ever Lived in
X Dickon
XI The Nest of the Missel Thrush
XII “Might I Have a Bit of Earth?”
XIII “I am Colin”
XIV A Young Rajah
XV Nest Building
XVI “I Won’t!” Said Mary
XVII A Tantrum
XVIII “Tha’ Munnot Waste No Time”
XIX “It Has Come!”
XX “I Shall Live Forever – and Ever – and Ever!”
XXI Ben Weatherstaff
XXII When the Sun Went Down
XXIII Magic
XXIV “Let Them Laugh”
XXV The Curtain
XXVI “It’s Mother!”
XXVII In the Garden
THE SECRET GARDEN
CHAPTER I
THERE IS NO ONE LEFT
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly,
fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived. The young English governess who came to teach her to read and write disliked her so much that she gave up her place in three months, and when other governesses came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Mary had not chosen to really want to know how to read books she would never have learned her letters at all.
One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she became crosser still when she saw that the servant who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah.
“Why did you come?” she said to the strange woman. “I will not let you stay. Send my Ayah to me.”
The woman looked frightened, but she only stammered that the Ayah could not come and when Mary threw herself into a passion and beat and kicked her, she looked only more frightened and repeated that it was not possible for the Ayah to come to Missie Sahib.
There was something mysterious in the air that morning.
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