The Stolen Singer | Page 6

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 genius. 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 grind I mind, though
that is bad enough; it is the 'Commercial Idea' that eats into a man's
innards. He forgets there are things that money can't buy, and in his
heart he grows contemptuous of anything to be had 'without money and
without price.' He can't help it. If he is thinking of trade nine-tenths of
the time, his mind gets set that way. I'm ready any minute to jump the

fence, like father's old colt up on the farm. I'm not a snob, but I
recognize now that there was some reason for all our old Hambleton
ancestors being so finicky about trade.
"Do you remember how we used to talk, when we were kiddies, about
keeping our ideals? Well, I believe I'm bankrupt, Aleck, in my account
with ideals. I don't want to howl, and these remarks don't go with
anybody else, but I can say, to you, I want them back again."
Aleck did as a kiddie should do, writing much advice on long sheets of
paper, and illustrating his points richly, like a good Scotchman, with
scientific instances. A month or two later he contrived to have