aid Mary anxiously. "It wouldn't seem like
a secret garden if it was tidy."

Dickon stood rubbing his rusty-red head with a rather puzzled look.

"It's a secret garden sure enough," he said, "but seems like some one
besides th' robin must have been in it since it was shut up ten year'
ago."

"But the door was locked and the key was buried," said Mary. "No one
could get in."

"That's true," he answered. "It's a queer place. Seems to me as if
there'd been a bit o' prunin' done here an' there, later than ten year'
ago."

"But how could it have been done?" said Mary.

He was examining a branch of a standard rose and he shook his head.

"Aye! how could it!" he murmured. "With th' door locked an' th' key
buried."

Mistress Mary always felt that however many years she lived she should
never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow. Of
course, it did seem to begin to grow for her that morning. When Dickon
began to clear places to plant seeds, she remembered what Basil had sung
at her when he wanted to tease her.

"Are there any flowers that look like bells?" she inquired.

"Lilies o' th' valley does," he answered, digging away with the trowel,
"an' there's Canterbury bells, an' campanulas."

"Let us plant some," said Mary.

"There's lilies o' th' valley here already; I saw 'em. They'll have
growed too close an' we'll have to separate 'em, but there's plenty. Th'
other ones takes two years to bloom from seed, but I can bring you some
bits o' plants from our cottage garden. Why does tha' want 'em?"

Then Mary told him about Basil and his brothers and sisters in India and
of how she had hated them and of their calling her "Mistress Mary Quite
Contrary."

"They used to dance round and sing at me. They sang--

'Mistress Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And marigolds all in a row.'

I just remembered it and it made me wonder if there were really flowers
like silver bells."

She frowned a little and gave her trowel a rather spiteful dig into the
earth.

"I wasn't as contrary as they were."

But Dickon laughed.

"Eh!" he said, and as he crumbled the rich black soil she saw he was
sniffing up the scent of it, "there doesn't seem to be no need for no
one to be contrary when there's flowers an' such like, an' such lots o'
friendly wild things runnin' about makin' homes for themselves, or
buildi