Grains of sand did seem queer things to collect, just the same, when you think that all you have to do is walk across a sand bar in low shoes and you get two shoes full in about a minute and find grains of sand in your bed for about a week. So we sort of teased Jibby Jones, and the end of it was that we all went into his father’s cottage to look at Jibby Jones’s collection. 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.”