Now, most folks would have been mad if anybody said that, but Jibby Jones wasn’t--he was proud of his nose. Jibby talked about his nose more than anybody else did, because it was a family relic, or something, and had come down to him from his Grandfather Parmenter and his Great-Grandfather Parmenter and his Great-Great-Grandfather Parmenter. Some folks are proud of a colonial spinning-wheel that has been in the family three hundred years, but Jibby was proud of his nose. And I guess he was right. A nose is a better relic than a spinning-wheel any day; it is handier. It don’t have to be dusted, and you can wash it when you are washing the rest of your face and save time that way, and you can carry it with you wherever you go. You have to. So Jibby looked at old Uncle Beeswax and grinned. “It’s my jib,” he said. “When the wind blows too hard, I have to take a couple of reefs in it.” Well, I guess Uncle Beeswax didn’t have a chance to hear many jokes, and when he heard that one he put down his basket and sat down on a stump and laughed and laughed. He whacked his leg, and I thought he would die, he laughed so hard. “Jib, hey?” he chuckled when he could get his breath. “Jib, is it? Well, if that’s so you ought to have some of my beeswax to waterproof it with. Nothing like good old beeswax to keep the weather from ruinin’ a jib.” Then he went off in another spell of laughing, and whacked his leg and the tears rolled down his face and got into his beard. So Jibby told him all about his nose and how he got it from his Grandfather Parmenter and how George Washington had complimented Jibby’s Great-Great-Grandfather Parmenter on _his_ nose, and in a couple of minutes old Uncle Beeswax was as chummy as a kid with us and told us all about his nose and how useful it was and all the forty or fifty things he had used to try to keep it from being so red, but no hope. He said it was a headstrong nose and if it made up its mind to be red it was bound to be red, and no use fooling with it. “If I had two of ’em,” he said, “and the other was a green one, I’d look like a steamboat.” He showed where he would have his two noses, if he had two, one on either cheek. “But one is plenty,” he said. “When a man has a nose like mine, or like yours,” he added politely to Jibby, “he has no excuse to covet any more nose. He’s got a bountiful supply.” He said it all with a twinkle in his eye, and from then on he was a good fellow with us.