“Oh, goody!” exclaimed Wooley Ball. “I see that you are not going to let the moths eat up your treasures. Moths hate camphor and moth balls. I just love them.”
“Oh, I know about moths,” said Mary Frances. “I learned a sad lesson about them. Once my aunt knit my doll a little——”
“Did you say Knit?” came another little voice.
“Oh, that’s only Knit and Knack, the Knitting Twins,” answered Crow Shay.
He turned toward the table where they lay.
“You two go to sleep again!” he said. “It’s not your turn yet.”
By this time the Yarn Baby looked like a porcupine. Her hair stood out so straight and stiff that Mary Frances was almost afraid to speak.
“He will keep on until he will have to be punished,” whispered Wooley Ball.
“Yes,” said the Yarn Baby, “if he doesn’t stop crowing so much I will not let him crochet.”
That seemed to scare Crow Shay terribly, and he did not utter another sound, but listened with all his ears.
“You were speaking of moths,” Wooley Ball reminded Mary Frances.
“Oh, yes—about the little coat which my aunt made for Angie, my doll. I used it all winter and in the summer I folded it and put it away in a little box. When the weather was cold again, and Angie needed it, I took it out of the box and what do you think happened?”
“I know!” declared Wooley Ball. “I know what happened. The little coat fell to pieces when you picked it up. The moths had bitten it all over.”
[Illustration: “The moths had bitten it all over”]
“Yes, that’s exactly what happened,” said Mary Frances. “It taught me never to put anything made of wool away without camphor or moth balls.”
WOOLEY BALL and the Yarn Baby looked over the yarns that Mary Frances had put on the sewing table.
“These are just right,” said the Yarn Baby. “You have every kind of wool here that we shall need. Will you see that all the yarns are wound into very, very loose balls before your next lesson?”
“Yes,” promised Mary Frances, “I will wind them over my hand the way Aunt Maria does, so that the balls feel quite ‘spongey.’ I wish that all yarns came from the factories wound in balls, though!”
“You are not the first person to wish that,” said the Yarn Baby. “Hanks and skeins are much harder for a child to manage than balls. Now, if you please, we will talk a few minutes about crochet hooks.”
