“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 breaths filling all the air and he had thought them.  A terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through.  He had forgotten and deserted his home and his duties.  When he traveled about, darkness so brooded over him that the sight of him was a wrong done to other people because it was as if he poisoned the air about him with gloom.  Most strangers thought he must be either half mad or a man with some hidden crime on his soul.  He was a tall man with a drawn face and crooked shoulders and the name he always entered on hotel registers was, “Archibald Craven, Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire, England.”

He had traveled far and wide since the day he saw Mistress Mary in his study and told her she might have her “bit of earth.”  He had been in the most beautiful places in Europe, though he had remained nowhere more than a few days.  He had chosen the quietest and remotest spots.  He 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.

But the light had never seemed to touch himself until one day when he realized that for the first time in ten years a strange thing had happened.  He was in a wonderful valley in the Austrian Tyrol and he had been walking alone through such beauty as might have lifted any man’s soul out of shadow.  He had walked a long way and it had not lifted his.  But at last he had felt tired and had thrown himself down to rest on a carpet of moss by a stream.  It was a clear little stream which ran quite merrily along on its narrow way through the luscious damp greenness.  Sometimes it made a sound rather like very low laughter as it bubbled over and round stones.  He saw birds come and dip their heads to drink in it and then flick their wings and fly away.  It seemed like a thing alive and yet its tiny voice made the stillness seem deeper.  The valley was very, very still.