After that we let him be one of us. We couldn’t be really mean to a fellow like that; he was too good-natured and willing, and too much fun, too. He was the queerest boy we ever knew. One day he came out in an old suit that was so small for him that the pants came halfway to his knees and his sleeves came only about halfway to his wrists. He did look funny! But we did not say anything; a fellow don’t care much about clothes. Jibby Jones said it. He said: “I don’t like this suit any more. I like my small suit better.” We could not believe we heard him correctly. “Your small suit!” I said. “You mean the big one you have been wearing. I should think you would call that your big suit and this one your small suit. That one is twice as big as this one.” “No,” he said, “this is my big suit. I got this suit two years ago and we all call this my big suit because when I got it it was too big for me. And the other was a little small for me when I got it this spring; so it is my small suit.” That was how he figured it out, and nobody could make him believe the small suit should be called the small one. It had been the “big suit” once, and that was the name of it, so it was always the “big suit.” We thought he was stupid. But he wasn’t. Not when you came to find out. He looked at things a different way from the rest of us, that was all. CHAPTER II THE PEARL-DIGGERS Well, it took us quite a while to learn that Jibby Jones was not as stupid as he looks, and that when he looks stupidest and says the queerest things is when he is farthest from being stupid. That is when that old brain of his is working hardest. It took us a couple of weeks to learn that, and to get to liking Jibby the way we did, and I don’t know that Wampus ever did think, in the bottom of his heart, that Jibby was anything but stupid and lucky. And at first we did try to “string” old Jibby good and plenty. We told him things about our river that would not have fooled a mud-cat or a carp. And when we told those things to Jibby, he would look at us through his spectacles in that serious way of his, and sometimes we were sure he believed the nonsense, and sometimes we were not so sure. One thing we told him was about getting mussel shells out of the river. That is quite a big business around Riverbank because there are so many pearl-button factories in Riverbank and they have to have shells to cut the buttons out of. The shells they use are mussel shells--a sort of clam shell--and hundreds of men dredge for the shells. Some of the men rake up the shells with long two-handled rakes and others drag for them with dull hooks strung on a long cross-bar. The mussels sort of bite the hooks and hang on and the dredgers pull them up.