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 anyone 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 must be either half mad or a man with some hidden
crime on his soul. He, was a tall man with a drawn face and crooked
shoulders and the name he always entered on hotel registers was,
Archibald Craven, Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire, England.
He had traveled far and wide since the day he saw Mistress Mary in his
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