s. Neither one could rationally be expected, "just
at present," to take up the family accounts and make the income square up
with even a decently generous outgo. And there were the girls yet to be
educated. Jim had no special talent to bless himself with, either in art
or science. He was inordinately fond of the sea, but that did not help
him in choosing a career. He had good taste in books and some little
skill in music. He was, indeed, thrall to the human voice, especially to
the low voice in woman, and he was that best of all critics, a good
listener. His greatest riches, as well as his greatest charm, lay in a
spirit of invincible youth; but he was no genius, no one perceived that
more clearly than himself.

So he remembered Clara Van Camp's advice, wrote the whole story to Aleck,
and cast about for the one successful business chance in the four
thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine bad ones--as the statistics have it.

He actually found it in shoes. Foot-ball muscle and grit went into the
job of putting a superior shoe on an inferior foot, if necessary--at
least on some foot. He got a chance to try his powers in the home branch
of a manufacturing house, and made good. When he came to fill a position
where there was opportunity to try new ideas, he tried them. He
inspected tanneries and stockyards, he got composite measurements of all
the feet in all the women's colleges in the year ninety-seven, he drilled
salesmen and opened a night school for the buttonhole-makers, he made a
scientific study of heels, and he invented an aristocratic arch and put
it on the market.

The family joked about his doings as the harmless experiments of a lively
boy, but presently they began to enjoy his income. Through it all they
were affectionate and kind, with the matter-of-course fondness which a
family gives to the member that takes the part of useful drudge. John,
the pet of the parents, married, and had his own eyes opened, it is to be
supposed. Donald, the genius, had just arrived, after a dozen years or
so, at the stage where he was mentioned now and then in the literary
journals. But Jim stuck to shoes and kept the family on a fair tide of
modest prosperity.

Once, in the years of Jim's apprenticeship to life, there came over him a
fit of soul-sickness that nearly proved his ruin.

"I can't stand this," he wrote Aleck Van Camp; "It's too hard and dry and
sordid for any man that's got a soul. It isn't the gri