It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together. Toby Drake knew they were roses because he saw them one time in a book. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rosebushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees.
There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves. There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Toby did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious. Toby had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it was different from any other place he had ever seen in his life.
"How still it is!" he whispered. "How still!"
Then he waited a moment and listened at the stillness. The robin, who had flown to his treetop, was still as all the rest. He did not even flutter his wings; he sat without stirring, and looked at Toby.
"No wonder it is still," he whispered again. "I am the first person who has spoken in here for ten years."
He moved away from the door, stepping as softly as if he were afraid of awakening some one. He was glad that there was grass under his feet and that his steps made no sounds. He walked under one of the fairy-like gray arches between the trees and looked up at the sprays and tendrils which formed them.
"I wonder if they are all quite dead," he said. "Is it all a quite dead garden? I wish it wasn't."
If he had been Beth Weatherstaff he could have told whether the wood was alive by looking at it, but he could only see that there were only gray or brown sprays and branches and none showed any signs of even a tiny leaf-bud anywhere. But he was inside the wonderful garden and he could come through the door under the ivy any time and he felt as if he had found a world all his own.
The sun was shining inside the four walls and the high arch of blue sky over this particular piece of Misselthwaite seemed even more brilliant and soft than it was over the moor. The robin flew down from his tree-top and hopped about or flew after Toby from one bush to another. He chirped a good deal and had a very busy air, as if he were showing him things. Everything was strange and silent and he seemed to be hundreds of miles away from any one, but somehow he did not feel lonely at all. All that troubled him was his wish that he knew whether all the roses were dead, or if perhaps some of them had lived and might put out leaves and buds as the weather got warmer. He did not want it to be a quite dead garden. If it were a quite alive garden, how wonderful it would be, and what thousands of roses would grow on every side!
He held his whine up car in his hands when he came in and after he had walked about for a while he thought he would wind up the car and chase it round the whole garden, stopping when he wanted to look at things. There seemed to have been grass paths here and there, and in one or two corners there were alcoves of evergreen with stone seats or tall moss-covered flower urns in them.
As he came near the second of these alcoves he stopped running. There had once been a flowerbed in it, and he thought he saw something sticking out of the black earth- -some sharp little pale green points. He remembered what Beth Weatherstaff had said and he knelt down to look at them.
