shabby clothes and were always quarreling and snatching
toys from each other.  Mary hated their untidy bungalow
and was so disagreeable to them that after the first day
or two nobody would play with her.  By the second day
they had given her a nickname which made her furious. 

It was Basil who thought of it first.  Basil was a little
boy with impudent blue eyes and a turned-up nose, and Mary
hated him.  She was playing by herself under a tree,
just as she had been playing the day the cholera broke out. 
She was making heaps of earth and paths for a garden
and Basil came and stood near to watch her.  Presently he
got rather interested and suddenly made a suggestion. 

"Why don't you put a heap of stones there and pretend
it is a rockery?" he said.  "There in the middle,"
and he leaned over her to point. 

"Go away!" cried Mary.  "I don't want boys.  Go away!"

For a moment Basil looked angry, and then he began to tease. 
He was always teasing his sisters.  He danced round
and round her and made faces and sang and laughed. 

         "Mistress Mary, quite contrary,
          How does your garden grow?
          With silver bells, and cockle shells,
          And marigolds all in a row."

He sang it until the other children heard and laughed, too;
and the crosser Mary got, the more they sang "Mistress Mary,
quite contrary"; and after that as long as she stayed
with them they called her "Mistress Mary Quite Contrary"
when they spoke of her to each other, and often when they
spoke to her. 

"You are going to be sent home," Basil said to her,
"at the end of the week.  And we're glad of it."

"I am glad of it, too," answered Mary.  "Where is home?"

"She doesn't know where home is!" said Basil,
with seven-year-old scorn.  "It's England, of course. 
Our grandmama lives there and our sister Mabel was sent
to her last year.  You are not going to your grandmama. 
You have none.  You are going to your uncle.  His name is
Mr. Archibald Craven."

"I don't know anything about him," snapped Mary. 

"I know you don't," Basil answered.  "You don't know anything. 
Girls never do.  I heard father and mother talking about him. 
He lives in a great, big, desolate old house in the
country and no one goes near him.  He's so cross he won't
let them, and they wouldn't come if he would let them. 
He's a hunchback, and he's horrid." "I don't believe you,"
said Mary; and she turned her back and stuck her fingers
in her ears, because she would not listen any more. 

But she thought over it a great deal afterward; and when
Mrs. Crawford told her that night that she was going
to sail away to England in a few days and go to her uncle,
Mr. Archibald Craven, who lived at Misselthwaite Manor,
she looked so stony and stubbornly uninterested that
they did not know what to think about her.  They tried
to be kind to her, but she only turned her face away
when Mrs. Crawford attempted to kiss her, and held
herself stiffly when Mr. Crawford patted her shoulder. 

"She is such a plain child," Mrs. Crawford said pityingly,
afterward.  "And her mother was such a pretty creature. 
She had a very pretty manner, too, and Mary has the most
unattractive ways I ever saw in a child.  The children
call her `Mistress Mary Quite Contrary,' and though
it's naughty of them, one can't help understanding it."

"Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face
and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery Mary
might have learned some pretty ways too.  It is very sad,
now the poor beautiful thing is gone, to remember that
many people never even knew that she had a child at all."

"I believe she scarcely ever looked at her,"
sighed Mrs. Crawford.  "When her Ayah was dead there
was no one to give a thought to the little thing. 
Think of the servants running away and leaving her all
alone in that deserted bungalow.  Colonel McGrew said he
nearly jumped out of his skin when he opened the door
and found her standing by herself in the middle of the room."

Mary made the long voyage to England under the care of
an officer's wife, who was taking her children to leave
them in a boarding-school. She was very much absorbed
in her own little boy and girl, and was rather glad to hand
the child over to the woman Mr. Archibald Craven sent
to meet her, in London.  The woman was his housekeeper
at Misselthwaite Manor, and her name was Mrs. Medlock. 
She was a stout woman, with very red cheeks and sharp
black eyes.  She wore a very purple dress, a black
silk mantle with jet fringe on it and a black bonnet