you let it stay there after
it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.

So long as Mistress Mary's mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about
her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determination not to
be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced,
sickly, bored and wretched child. Circumstances, however, were very
kind to her, though she was not at all aware of it. They began to push
her about for her own good. When her mind gradually 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 b