pale-faced youths or ailing mankind; and the Book of Judgment, alone,
will reveal the harvest of destruction which Time reaped through
Doctor Jim's influence in L---County. Yet, oddly, it was Doctor Jim's
principle and practice never to treat. He claimed he had never offered
a living soul a social drink.

"Drink whiskey right and it won't hurt anybody!" Did it hurt?

Doctor Jim and his two brothers spent their early life on a plantation
in Mississippi. The father wanted the boys to be educated. Two of them
took medical courses in New Orleans. Doctor Jim wished to see more of
the world, and literally did see much of it on a two-year cruise
around the Horn to the East Indies and China. He was thirty-five years
old in '60 when he married. Then he served as surgeon--"mighty poor
surgeon" he used to say, for a Mississippi regiment throughout the
four years of the Civil War. He and his two brothers passed through
this conflict and returned home to find their father dead, the negroes
scattered and the old plantation devastated. The three with their
families journeyed to Texas--the then Land of Promise! At twenty-five
cents an acre they bought river-bottom lands which are to-day
priceless, and the losses of the past were soon forgotten in the rapid
prosperity of the following years.

Mrs. McDonald represented all that high type of character which the
dark years of the war brought out in so many instances of Southern
womanhood. Patient, hopeful, uncomplaining she lived through the four
years of war-time separation, left her own people and journeyed to the
Southwest to begin life anew. She was particularly robust of physique,
domestic in a high sense, gentle and deeply kind. She passed through
hardship, privation and prosperity practically not knowing sickness.