always teasing his sisters. He danced round and round her and made
faces and sang and laughed.
Mistress Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And marigolds all in a row.
He sang it until the other children heard and laughed, too; and the
crosser Mary got, the more they sang Mistress Mary, quite contrary ;
and after that as long as she stayed with them they called her
Mistress Mary Quite Contrary when they spoke of her to each other,
and often when they spoke to her.
You are going to be sent home, Basil said to her, at the end of the
week. And we re glad of it.
I am glad of it, too, answered Mary. Where is home?
She doesn t know where home is! said Basil, with seven-year-old
scorn. It s England, of course. Our grandmama lives there and our
sister Mabel was sent to her last year. You are not going to your
grandmama. You have none. You are going to your uncle. His name is Mr.
Archibald Craven.
I don t know anything about him, snapped Mary.
I know you don t, Basil answered. You don t know anything. Girls
never do. I heard father and mother talking about him. He lives in a
great, big, desolate old house in the country and no one goes near him.
He s so cross he won t let them, and they wouldn t come if he would let
them. He s a hunchback, and he s horrid.
I don t believe you, said Mary; and she turned her back and stuck her
fingers in her ears, because she would not listen any more.
But she thought over it a great deal afterward; and when Mrs. Crawford
told her that night that she was going to sail away to England in a few
days and go to her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, who lived at
Misselthwaite Manor, she looked so stony and stubbornly uninterested
8