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.

/tab\"Where you tend a rose, my lad,
/tab\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

[[355]]

p354 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p355w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p356

v?