ally filled itself with robins, and
moorland cottages crowded with children, with queer crabbed old
gardeners and common little Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime and
with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and also with a moor boy
and his "creatures," there was no room left for the disagreeable
thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow
and tired.

So long as Colin shut himself up in his room and thought only of his
fears and weakness and his detestation of people who looked at him and
reflected hourly on humps and early death, he was a hysterical
half-crazy little hypochondriac who knew nothing of the sunshine and the
spring and also did not know that he could get well and could stand upon
his feet if he tried to do it. When new beautiful thoughts began to push
out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran
healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood.
His scientific experiment was quite practical and simple and there was
nothing weird about it at all. Much more surprising things can happen to
any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his
mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting
in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one
place.

"Where you tend a rose, my lad,
A thistle cannot grow."

While the secret garden was coming alive and two children were coming
alive with it, there was a man wandering about certain far-away
beautiful places in the Norwegian fiords and the valleys and mountains
of Switzerland and he was a man who for ten years had kept his mind
filled with dark and heart-broken thinking. He had not been courageous;
he had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark
ones. He had wandered by blue lakes and thought them; he had lain on
mountain-sides with sheets of deep blue gentians blooming all about him
and flower breaths filling all the air and he had thought them. A
terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had
let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to
allow any rift of light to pierce through. He had forgotten and deserted
his home and his duties. When he traveled about, darkness so brooded
over him that the sight of him was a wrong done to other people because
it was as if he poisoned the air about him with gloom. Most strangers
thought he m