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 work to do in Boston, so that he could go out to Lynn and look up Jimmy’s case.  He even devised a cure by creating, in his mind, an office in the biological world which was to be offered to James on the ground that science needed just his abilities and training.  But when Aleck arrived in Lynn he found that Jim, in some fashion or other, had found a cure for himself.  He was deeper than ever in the business, and yet, in some spiritual sense, he had found himself.  He had captured his ideal again and yoked it to duty—­which is a great feat.