Say! He brought out a little tin box just about as big as my hand, and opened it, and he brought out a magnifying-glass that was a dandy. That magnifying-glass made a pin look as big as a railway spike, almost. It made a grain of sand look almost as big as a diamond a lady wears in a ring. I guess we did open our eyes when Jibby Jones began to show us his collection of grains of sand.
In the little tin box were little squares of card, just about the size of postage stamps, and each grain of sand was glued to its card, with the place it came from and the date Jibby Jones got that grain of sand all written out on the little card. He had each little card wrapped in tissue paper, so that if the grain of sand came off the card it would not be lost.
The first specimen he let us see was a grain of sand from the seashore of the Atlantic Ocean, United States. Without the magnifying-glass you could not see it at all, but when we looked through the glass at it we all said, “Oh, boy!” It was like a drop of moonlight shut up in a clear stone. It did not sparkle; it glowed. Then he showed us one from the Pacific Ocean that was like yellow sunlight.
Just about then we changed our minds about Jibby Jones having a fool sort of collection. He had a grain of sand from every place he had been. He had one from the Nile, and one from the edge of the Sahara Desert, and one from the River Jordan, and two from the St. Lawrence and hundreds more.
“This one is from the San Gabriel River in California,” Jibby Jones said, when he showed us one grain. “It isn’t very odd, but it was got in a queer way. Father wouldn’t stop to let me get a grain of sand out of that river, because we were just going by on an interurban trolley car, so I thought I would get a grain of sand, anyway. I chewed some gum and fastened it to a string, and when we went over the bridge I stood on the end of the car and let the gum drag in the sand. It caught a lot of grains.”
Jibby Jones had about the bulliest collection I ever looked at.
“It is just as good as a collection of mountains and caverns and all sorts of minerals would be, when you get used to it,” Jibby Jones said, “because that is what sand is—mountains and rocks that have broken down and been crushed and then rolled by the water until the sharp edges are worn smooth.”
He had some cards that had more than one grain of sand glued to them—fifty or a hundred grains.
“When I get specimens for places,” Jibby Jones said, “I keep only one grain of sand, because father didn’t want me to collect anything bulky, but these are for color, so I keep more grains.”
Well, I did not know there were so many kinds of sand in the whole world! Jibby Jones had black sand, and sand as red as blood, and sand as blue as indigo, and sand of almost every color you ever heard of, and then some colors you never did hear of. We were saying, “Oh, boy!” and, “My gimini crickets!” every minute, and, all at once, Skippy said:
“Say, Jibby, you haven’t any green sand!”
“Yes, I have,” Jibby said, and he showed us a card of green sand.
“I don’t mean that kind of green,” Skippy said. “I mean green that the light shows through; not solid green. I know where there is a kind of green you have not got. You know, fellows; that green sand in Murrell’s Run, down below town.”
“Sure! I know!” I said, as excited as if somebody had told me where there was a million dollars. “Out back of that old brick house, Skippy.”
We all remembered it. We had found it one day when we were wading up the Run, and there was a lot of it. It was right in the bottom of the Run, and we all waded in it and dug our toes in it and said it was a queer kind of sand.
Jibby Jones straightened up and looked at me through his spectacles.
“Green sand?” he said in a queer way. “Green sand?”
“You bet!” I said. “And lots of it. And it’s the only place anybody ever heard of green sand being, around here.”
“In a creek?” Jibby asked.
“Yes; up in the hills below town,” I said. “Only they don’t call that creek a creek; they call it a ‘run’—Murl’s Run,” I said, pronouncing it the way we always did.
“I’d like to have some of that green sand—for my collection,” Jibby drawled.
“Well,” I said, “we’ll get you some; we know right where it is.”
“I would rather get it myself,” Jibby said. “I like my sand specimens when I get them myself.”
So that was how, the first Saturday after school began, Jibby Jones went with us out toward the Run. We all wanted to get green sand for our collections of sand, because we had all four started in collecting sand. As soon as we got through looking at Jibby’s collection, we went over to the sand bar to get some Mississippi River sand to start our collections. Only we didn’t get just one grain apiece; we got about a peck apiece. We thought maybe we could exchange grains of Mississippi River sand with boys in California and other places. We got enough sand to exchange with about a million boys, and there was plenty left in the river, too.
Going to Murrell’s Run to get the green sand we went out the road past the cemetery for about
