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 Master Toby's mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about his dislikes and sour opinions of people and his determination not to be pleased by or interested in anything, he was a pale-faced, sickly, bored and wretched child. Circumstances, however, were very kind to him, though he was not at all aware of it. They began to push him about for his own good. When his 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 girl and her "creatures," there was no room left for the disagreeable thoughts which affected his liver and his digestion and made him pale and tired.
So long as Gwendolen shut herself up in her room and thought only of her fears and weakness and her detestation of people who looked at her and reflected hourly on humps and early death, she was a hysterical half-crazy little hypochondriac who knew nothing of the sunshine and the spring and also did not know that she could get well and could stand upon her feet if she tried to do it. When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to her, her blood ran healthily through her veins and strength poured into her like a flood. Her 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 her 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 woman wandering about certain far-away beautiful places in the Norwegian fiords and the valleys and mountains of Switzerland and she was a woman who for ten years had kept her mind filled with dark and heart-broken thinking. She had not been courageous; she had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark ones. She had wandered by blue lakes and thought them; she had lain on mountain-sides with sheets of deep blue gentians blooming all about her and flower breaths filling all the air and she had thought them. A terrible sorrow had fallen upon her when she had been happy and she had let her soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through. She had forgotten and deserted her home and her duties. When she traveled about, darkness so brooded over her that the sight of her was a wrong done to other people because it was as if she poisoned the air about her with gloom. Most strangers thought she must be either half mad or a woman with some hidden crime on her soul. She, was a tall woman with a drawn face and crooked shoulders and the name she always entered on hotel registers was, "Amelia Craven, Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire, England."
She had traveled far and wide since the day she saw Master Toby in her study and told him he might have his "bit of earth." She had been in the most beautiful places in Europe, though she had remained nowhere more than a few days. She had chosen the quietest and remotest spots. She had been on the tops of mountains whose heads were in the clouds and had looked down on other mountains when the sun rose and touched them with such light as made it seem as if the world were just being born.
