Another thing that made him look oldish was his spectacles. He wore spectacles with big, round glasses in them and tortoise-shell rims and handles--if the things you put behind your ears are called handles. But the thing that made him look the queerest was his nose. It was the biggest nose I ever saw in my life, or that Tad or Skippy or Wampus ever saw. They said so. It was bigger than any nose I ever saw on a man, and the funniest thing about it was that when you looked right straight at Jibby Jones from in front it did not look like a big nose at all; it only looked like a big nose from the side. This was because his nose was not thick or wide, but only long and much. It was straight enough, but it started too far up on his forehead and went so far out into the air in front of him that it was a long way back to his face again. The thing it made me think of was a rudder, or the centerboard of a boat, only, if it had been a rudder, it should not have been on the front of his head, but on the back of it. So this Jibby Jones stood thinking, because I had said: “What do you think a motor-boat is for?” After a while he nodded his head as if he had thought enough and said: “That’s a good question. I never thought of that question before, but, when you think about it like that, motor-boats are used for different things, aren’t they?” “Yes; for climbing church steeples,” Skippy said, joking him. Jibby Jones looked at us thoughtfully. “I think you’re teasing me,” he said. “A great many people tease me. It is because I look stupid. But I am not as stupid as I look.” Wampus nudged me. “Who told you that?” he asked Jibby Jones. “My father told me,” Jibby Jones said, and he did not even crack a smile. He was in dead earnest. “My father has said to me, several times, ‘Son, you are not as stupid as you look.’” “Well, he ought to know,” Tad said. “Yes, that’s what I think,” Jibby Jones said. “I always think my father ought to know, because he is an author and writes books. An author who writes books has to know a great many things.” Well, Tad put down the wrench he was using then and looked at Jibby Jones again, and I guess we all looked at him. We had heard that some author man was coming to Birch Island, and we knew this must be the author man’s boy. So we took a good look at him. I don’t know what we would have said next, or whether we would have said anything, but Jibby Jones spoke: “What I was thinking, when I said motor-boats were used for various things, was that I saw one used on the Amazon as a coffin. A man father knew was bitten by a snake and died and the natives used his motor-boat as a coffin to bury him in. That was what I meant. I have never seen a motor-boat used to climb church steeples. I mean actually to climb them. The nearest I have come to seeing that was in Nebraska when they used a motor-boat to ring the fire-alarm bell.”