But perhaps the greatest cross which Julia had to bear, and the one from which he stood in the greatest danger of getting into the Patchwork School, was his Grandmothers.  I don’t mean to say that grandmothers are to be considered usually as crosses.  A dear old lady seated with her knitting beside the fire, is a pleasant person to have in the house.  But Julia had four, and he had to hunt for their spectacles, and pick up their balls of yarn so much that he got very little time to play.  It was an unusual thing, but the families on both sides were very long-lived, and there actually were four grandmothers; two great ones, and two common ones; two on each side of the fireplace, with their knitting work, in Julia’s home.  They were nice old ladies, and Julia loved them dearly, but they lost their spectacles all the time, and were always dropping their balls of yarn, and it did make a deal of work for one boy to do.  He could have hunted up spectacles for one Grandmother, but when it came to four, and one was always losing hers while he was finding another’s, and one ball of yarn would drop and roll off, while he was picking up another—­well, it was really bewildering at times.  Then he had to hold the skeins of yarn for them to wind, and his arms used to ache, and he could hear the boys shouting at a game of ball outdoors, maybe.  But he never refused to do anything his Grandmothers asked him to, and did it pleasantly, too; and it was not on that account he got into the Patchwork School.

[Illustration:  JULIA WAS ARRESTED ON CHRISTMAS DAY.]

It was on Christmas day that Julia was arrested and led away to the Patchwork School.  It happened in this way:  As I said before, Julia’s parents were poor, and it was all they could do to procure the bare comforts of life for their family; there was very little to spend for knickknacks.  But I don’t think Julia would have complained at that; he would have liked useful articles just as well for Christmas presents, and would not have been unhappy because he did not find some useless toy in his stocking, instead of some article of clothing, which he needed to make him comfortable.  But he had had the same things over and over, over and over, Christmas after Christmas.  Every year each of his Grandmothers knit him two pairs of blue woollen yarn stockings, and hung them for him on Christmas Eve, for a Christmas present.  There they would hang—­eight pairs of stockings with nothing in them, in a row on the mantel shelf, every Christmas morning.

Every year Julia thought about it for weeks before Christmas, and hoped and hoped he would have something different this time, but there they always hung, and he had to go and kiss his Grandmothers, and pretend he liked the stockings the best of anything he could have had; for he would not have hurt their feelings for the world.

His parents might have bettered matters a little, but they did not wish to cross the old ladies either, and they had to buy so much yarn they could not afford to get anything else.