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'Where, you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.'

Orphaned and sent to live with her uncle in his austere manor on the moors, Mary Lennox is a lonely and unhappy child. A meeting with Dickon, her servant's brother begins her adventure and it is through their friendship and her relationship with her troubled hypochondriac cousin Colin that she begins to learn about herself. Their lives all begin to change when a Robin shows Mary the door to a mysterious secret garden.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), best known for The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy, wrote this 1922 novel about a group of pre-WWI English nobles and commoners with some pointed political and social commentary. Her sequel, Robin, completes the story of Robin, Lord Coombe.

It is the child no one ever saw exclaimed the man, turning to his companions. She has actually been forgotten Why was I forgotten? Mary said, stamping her foot. Why does nobody come? The young man whose name was Barney looked at her very sadly. Mary even thought she saw him wink his eyes as if to wink tears away. Poor little kid he said. There is nobody left to come. It was in that strange and sudden way that Mary found out that she had neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of them even remembering that there was a Missie Sahib. That was why the place was so quiet. It was true that there was no one in the bungalow but herself and the little rustling snake. Bratty and spoiled Mary Lennox is orphaned when her parents fall victim to a cholera outbreak in India. As a result, Mary becomes the ward of an uncle in England she has never met. secluded Misselthwaite Manor, Mary befriends a high-spirited boy named Dickon and investigates a secret garden on the Manor grounds. She also discovers a sickly young cousin, Colin, who has been shut away in a hidden Manor room. Together Mary and Dickon help Colin blossom, and in the process Mary finds her identity and melts the heart of her emotionally distant uncle. -- Publishers Weekly

At the age of sixteen Frances Hodgson Burnett moved to Tennessee with her bankrupt family and began writing for American magazines as means to support herself. Over two decades later Burnett published "Little Lord Fauntleroy," modeling the character after her son Vivian. Burnett's text and Reginald Birch's original illustrations helped popularize a very romantic style of dress for boys -- a velvet suit with a broad lace collar -- in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.