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Copywork
About This Passage
Frances Hodgson Burnett lets Mary's solitude gather for pages — empty rooms, closed cabinets, portraits staring back — and then cracks it open with a rustling sound and a peeping head. The passage teaches pacing: the writer makes you feel the quiet before she lets you feel the surprise. Careful copying shows how the long sentences pile detail on detail before the small, living thing finally appears.
In all her wanderings through the long corridors and the empty rooms, she had seen nothing alive; but in this room she saw something. Just after she had closed the cabinet door she heard a tiny rustli...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 6 in three or four paragraphs. Begin with the rainy morning and Martha's stories about Dickon, his fox cub, and the crow named Soot. Then describe Mary's wandering through the corridors and galleries of Misselthwaite Manor, the portrait of the stiff little girl with the green parrot, and the hundred ivory elephants she finds in the cabinet. Next tell about the mother mouse and her six babies. End with the second crying Mary hears through the walls, Mrs. Medlock catching her, and Mary's determination at the hearth-rug that there really was someone crying.
Discussion Questions
- Martha tells Mary that Dickon once brought home a half-drowned fox cub in his shirt and tamed a young crow named Soot. What kind of person does this story make Dickon seem like, and why does Burnett give us this information about him before Mary has ever met him?
- Mary stops in the gallery and says, I wish you were here, to the painting of a stiff little girl in a green brocade dress holding a green parrot. What does this moment tell us that Mary has started to understand about herself at Misselthwaite Manor?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
wanderings means the walking about without a clear destination that Mary does as she goes from corridor to corridor in the empty house.
Item 2
rustling means the soft, whispery sound something makes as it moves — the small noise the mother mouse makes in the cushion.
Item 3
frightened means scared and alarmed — the way the little mouse's bright eyes look when they first peep out at Mary.
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Critical Thinking
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