?" 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's 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
buildin' nests an' singin' an' whistlin', does there?"

Mary, kneeling by him holding the seeds, looked at him and stopped
frowning.

"Dickon," she said, "you are as nice as Martha said you were. I like
you, and you make the fifth person. I never thought I should like five
people."

Dickon sat up on his heels as Martha did when she was polishing the
grate. He did look funny and delightful, Mary thought, with his round
blue eyes and red cheeks and happy looking turned-up nose.

"Only five folk as tha' likes?" he said. "Who is th' other four?"

"Your mother and M