“We’re alike, you and me” old Ben Weatherstaff said to Mary.

“We’re not pretty to look at and we’re both very disagreeable.”

Poor Mary! Nobody wants her, nobody likes her. Her parents have died, and she is sent home from Indies to live in her uncle’s house in Yorkshire. It is a big old house, with nearly a hundred rooms, but most of then ore shut and locked. Mary is cross and bored, and lonely. There is nothing to do all day, and no one to talk to, except old Ben Weatherstaff, the gardener.

But then Mary learns about the secret garden. The door is locked and hidden, and the key is lost. No one has been inside the secret garden for ten years - except the robin, who flies over the wall. Mary watches the robin, and wonders where the key is…

And tehn there is that strange crying in the night, somewhere in the house. It sounds like a child crying…

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in 1849 and died in 1924, From the age of sixteen she lived mostly in teh USA, but often returned to England. She was a writer all her life and wrote many books, but The Secret Garden is her most famous story.