“Our magic?” asked the children in bewilderment.
“Why, yes,” replied the Bramble Bush Man, sitting down in his chair again. They saw that he hadn’t meant them to leave at all. “Certainly I should thank you for your magic. It is a great deal more wonderful than mine. I could never change glasses into eyes or a stick into a man. You are Magic Makers of the first order while I am only a trick magician.”
“You are not. You’re wondrous wise,” said Mary forgetting to be polite.
“I was not always so,” he admitted. “Not so long ago I was a cranky headless man—headless in more ways than one. It was your magic that worked the change.”
They began to see what he meant. But still they did not quite understand.
“I’m no good at explaining things,” the magician confessed. “My business is mystifying, not explaining. Run and get your mother, Muffs girl. She can explain.”
“My mother!” Muffs exclaimed. “She’s afraid of you. She said she didn’t want to meet you.”
“I want to meet her,” he insisted. “Tell her the Bramble Bush Man wants to meet her, that he won’t take no for an answer.”
“You’ll wait right here?” asked Muffs uncertainly. “And may Mary and Tommy go with me? Mary’s good at getting her own way.”
The Bramble Bush Man agreed to this with a chuckle and sat there smiling to himself as they walked away.