“You are just what I—what I wanted,”
he said. “I wish you were my mother—as
well as Dickon’s!”
All at once Susan Sowerby bent down and drew him with
her warm arms close against the bosom under the blue
cloak—as if he had been Dickon’s
brother. The quick mist swept over her eyes.
“Eh! dear lad!” she said. “Thy
own mother’s in this ’ere very garden,
I do believe. She couldna’ keep out of
it. Thy father mun come back to thee—he
mun!”
IN THE GARDEN
In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful
things have been discovered. In the last century
more amazing things were found out than in any century
before. In this new century hundreds of things
still more astounding will be brought to light.
At first people refuse to believe that a strange new
thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can
be done, then they see it can be done—then
it is done and all the world wonders why it was not
done centuries ago. One of the new things people
began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just
mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric
batteries—as good for one as sunlight is,
or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought
or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as
letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body.
If 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.
