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Copywork
About This Passage
This paragraph is Chapter 25's answer to the weather problem. The children cannot go to the garden, so Burnett sends them indoors on a substitute pilgrimage through rooms nobody uses — and the prose itself takes on the quality of wandering. Sentences accumulate; the syntax drifts from room to room the way the children do; Burnett tucks specific objects (ivory elephants, the empty mouse-hole) beside abstractions ('a fascinating thing') to mimic how real exploration feels, where the trivial and the profound present themselves in the same moment. Copying this passage trains the ear for cumulative syntax — a single sentence that keeps gathering phrases because the thought keeps unfolding — and the eye for concrete detail planted inside abstract observation. It also quietly answers the chapter's deepest question: whether the Magic works only in the garden, or wherever the children give something their full attention.
They went to the Indian room and amused themselves with the ivory elephants. They found the rose-colored brocade boudoir and the hole in the cushion the mouse had left, but the mice had grown up and r...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize Chapter 25 in five to seven sentences, giving balanced attention to (a) the opening paragraphs from the robin's point of view, (b) the rainy-day exploration of the hundred unused rooms, and (c) Colin's decision about the curtained portrait of his mother. End with Colin's final line about his father and explain what it implies about what the children's work in the garden has begun to reach toward.
Discussion Questions
- The chapter opens not with Colin or Mary but with the robin's observations of them — his worry that Colin's 'slow movements might mean that he was preparing to pounce, as cats do,' and his later conclusion that the boy was 'learning to fly—or rather to walk.' Why does Burnett give an entire opening section to a bird's interior life, and what does the robin's limited but sincere perspective give us that a human observer could not?
- When the rain keeps them indoors, Mary's 'inspiration' is to explore the hundred rooms nobody visits — and Colin immediately compares it to finding 'a secret garden.' What does it mean that Colin instinctively recognizes the unused corridors as kin to the walled garden, and what claim is Burnett making about where a secret can live?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
causing a small, unsettled surprise — a break in expectation that is puzzling or slightly unnerving without being alarming.
Item 2
causing or likely to cause harm or damage, whether physical, emotional, or to something's well-being.
Item 3
in a way that shows tolerant, affectionate allowance — excusing a weakness or softness with warmth rather than criticism.
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Critical Thinking
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