The Secret Garden blog post #2

Title: The Secret Garden
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: Historical Fiction
Number of pages: 107/311

Report section:A rain falls in Misselthwaite and keeps Mary indoors. She sets to search for the Misselthwaite's library, and to explore its hundreds of shuttered rooms. Later on Mary sees many portraits and one of them is a girl who looks just like Mary. Mary even talks to the portrait a bit but then she continues. Upon entering one of the rooms that open onto the corridor, Mary finds yet another portrait of the girl who looks so like her. The girl's stare unnerves her, and she leaves to explore a number of other rooms, stopping finally in one that might have once been a lady's sitting room. Suddenly, she hears a rustling sound behind her, and turns around and sees a family of gray mice living in one of the room's velvet cushions. Mary thinks to herself that, though the mice and she may be the only living things in the manor at that moment. Upon going back into the corridor, Mary again hears a child's cry; when she goes off in search of its source, she meets Mrs. Medlock, who takes her back to her room. On the next day Mary asks Martha if she can sometime visit her family but Martha thinks that this might be impossible. As Mary is walking around thinking of the secret garden she sees the robin again. The robin follows her, and Mary again tries to talk to him in chirps and twitters. The bird leads her to a mound of freshly turned earth, which, when Mary examines it closely, contains a tarnished key that has long been buried. It may, Mary thinks, be the key to the secret garden. She desperately wishes to find the garden because it has been locked for so long—if she could only go inside, she thinks, she could invent her own games and play them there alone, and no one would ever know where she was, nor how and where to find her. Though Mary closely examines the thick ivy that grows upon the stone walls of the garden, she cannot find the door, and, at length, returns to the manor.  Martha's mother is terribly concerned about Mary, and has sent her a skipping rope as a present. The girls thanks martha and then she goes outside to practice jumping. As Mary is skipping down the path with the robin beside her, a gust of wind disturbs some of the ivy growing upon the stone wall. Beneath the ivy is a door, which Mary unlocks with the key she unearthed the day before. She finds herself standing inside the secret garden. She sees many roses big as trees but still she is worried that she might not be the only living thing inside there. Mary spends the whole day gardening inside the garden. Mary asks Martha for tools that can help her with the gardening and Martha suggests her to write a letter to Dickon (Martha's brother) and ask for tools and maybe he can bring them himself. When Martha briefly steps out of the room, Mary hears the same far-off crying as she did during the storm. Martha again refuses to admit that she too hears the sound, and flees the room to avoid answering Mary's questions. Mary follows one of the laurel-paths into the woods in search of rabbits. She hears an odd whistling sound and, following it, comes upon a boy playing a wooden pipe beneath one of the trees. The boy is surrounded by animals (a pheasant, a squirrel, two rabbits) and Mary knows him almost immediately as Dickon Sowerby, the famous animal-charmer. Mary decides to show Dickon the secret garden but he has to keep the secret. he agrees and then they go inside it. Dickon is impressed by how much word Mary did by herself and then the children start working on the gardening. Later Mary is called for dinner and she is worried that she will never see Dickon again since he could just vanish but he promises to keep the secret of the garden.

Response section: Well if I have to be honest I didn't expect that Mary will find the secret garden that soon. Everything happened too fast - the finding of the key, the gate leading to the garden, the boy and etc. I am now wondering what will happen next since the girl's goal is completed. 

Passage section: "It's this,' she said. "It's a secret garden and I'm the only one in the world who wants it to be alive."

Dickon looked round and round about it, and round and round again. 

"Eh!" he almost whispered, "it is a queer, pretty place! It's like as if a body was in a dream."

This passage catch my attention quite a lot because it is somehow mysterious. The first two lines represent how Mary showed the secret garden to Dickon. But the rest of the passage is strange. It is the last passage from chapter 10 (page 107) and this shows me that maybe something will happen in the next chapter.