The Secret Garden, inside the high walls

Frances Hodgson Burnett published 1911 468 characters easy

The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together. Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen a great many roses in India. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rosebushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees.

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About this text

Frances Hodgson Burnett published The Secret Garden in 1911, after it ran as a serial in an American magazine. She had a walled rose garden of her own at Great Maytham Hall in Kent, and that garden is usually named as the model. She wrote more than fifty books, and this one was not the most popular in her lifetime. Project Gutenberg carries the full text.

Where this text comes fromEverything in this description says the place is dead. The stems are leafless, the growth is thick and tangled, nothing is named as flowering, and a child looking at it would reasonably conclude there is nothing inside worth finding. That is the trick the chapter is playing: the reader is being handed the evidence for the opposite conclusion and left to reach it later, in spring. Nothing is stated. The whole effect is carried by which details are chosen and which are left out.

What you might not noticeThe whole passage contains not a single comma. Burnett writes four sentences of eighty-six words with nothing but full stops between them, which is the plainest punctuation of any prose text on this site. Source

What it trainsFour full stops and nothing else. No commas, no semicolons, no dashes, no apostrophes: across 468 characters the full stop is the only mark, which makes this the cleanest fingering anywhere in the English corpus here. What that removes in difficulty it puts back in stamina, because eighty-six words with no internal punctuation give the eye no landmarks and the hand no reason to pause. The one long word is rosebushes, ten letters written as a single unit rather than as two, which most people type with a space the first time.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg