Then, of course, there is always Mary's mother; and Mrs. Makebelieve, with her beaked nose, and her eyes like pools of ink, and her eagle-flights of speech would give a backbone to any story. Mrs. Makebelieve has and holds all the privileges of the poor and the lonely. Moreover, she is the eternal Charwoman. "She could not remain for any length of time in peoples' employment without being troubled by the fact that these folk had houses of their own and were actually employing her in a menial capacity." Mrs. Makebelieve is, I think, a typical figure. She is the incarnation of the pride and liveliness and imaginative exuberance that permit the poor to live. How poor are Mary and Mrs. Makebelieve? We know their lack by the measure of their desire. Mrs. Makebelieve, always generous, would have paid her servants Ten Shillings per Week each, and their Board. And we know that she had often observed desolate people dragging themselves through the streets, standing to glare through the windows of bakeries and confectioners' shops, with little children in some of their arms, and that thinking of such things every morsel she ate would have choked her were it not for her own hunger. By our being brought to desire what Mary and her mother desired we come to know the things they lacked. Yes, poverty was the state in which Mary and Mrs. Makebelieve existed, but freedom was the other side of that poverty. They had not to set the bounds of realization upon their wishes. They were not shut off, as too many of us are, from the adventure and the enchantment that are in things. A broken mirror upon the wall of a bare room! It is, after all, that wonder of wonders, a thing. But one cannot convey to those who have not known the wonder, how wonderful a mere thing is! A child who has watched and watched the face of a grandfather's clock, stopped before he was born, feels this wonder. To grown folk and to those who have many possessions the things they own are lumber, some more convenient, some more decorative than others. But to those who have few possessions things are familiars and have an intimate history. Hence it is only the poor or only unspoiled children that have the full freedom of things--who can enter into their adventure and their enchantment. Mary and her mother have this franchise. And for this reason also "Mary, Mary" has an inner resemblance to a folk-tale. For the folk-tale, shaped as it has been by the poor and by unspoiled people, reveals always the adventure and the enchantment of things. An old lamp may be Aladdin's. A comb might kill a false queen. A key may open the door of a secret chamber. A dish may be the supreme possession of a King. The sense of the uniqueness of things--the sense that the teller of the folk-tale has always, and that such a poet of the poor as Burns has often, is in "Mary, Mary." And there is in it too the zest that the hungry--not the starved but the hungry--have for life.