essful druggist, and could afford, if anybody could, to be
supercilious toward trade. But she wasn't, even after twenty years of
somewhat restless submission to the Hambleton yoke. And it was she who,
during her last visit to the family stronghold, held up before the young
James the advantages of a commercial career.

"You're a nice boy, Jimsy, and I can't see you turned into a poor lawyer.
You're not hard-headed enough to be a good one. As for being a minister,
well--no. Go into business, dear boy, something substantial, and you'll
live to thank your stars."

Jimsy received this advice at the time with small enthusiasm, and a
reservation of criticism that was a credit to his manners, at least. But
the time came when he leaned on it.

Her own child, however, Mrs. Van Camp encouraged to a profession from the
first. "Aleck isn't smart enough for business, but he may do something
as a student," was Mrs. Van Camp's somewhat trying explanation; and Aleck
did do something as a student. Extremely impatient with any exhibition
of laziness, the mother demanded a good accounting of her son's time.
Aleck and Jim, who were born in the same year, ran more or less side by
side until the end of college. They struggled together in sports and in
arguments, "rushed" the same girl in turn or simultaneously, and spent
their long vacations cruising up and down the Maine coast in a
thirty-foot sail-boat. Once they made a more ambitious journey all the
way to Yarmouth and the Bay of Fundy in a good-sized fishing-smack.

But when college was done, their ways separated. Mrs. Van Camp, in the
prime of her unusual faculties, died, having decorated the Hambleton
'scutcheon like a gay cockade stuck airily up into the breeze. She had
no part nor lot in the family pride, but understood it, perhaps, better
than the Hambletons themselves. Her crime was that she played with it.
Aleck, a full-fledged biologist, went to the Little Hebrides to work out
his fresh and salad theory concerning the nerve system of the clam.

James, third son of John and Edith Hambleton of Lynn, had his eyes
thoroughly opened in the three months after Commencement by a
consideration of the family situation. It seemed to him that from
babyhood he had been burningly conscious of the pinching and skimping
necessary to maintain the family pride. The two older brothers were
exempt from the scorching process, the eldest being the family darling
and the second a geniu