lovable in every way, and beloved. She was blond like her father,
though not as robust as either father or mother, and in ideals and
character was truly the latter's daughter. She finished in a finishing
school, had musical ability and charm, and soon married and made a
happy home--an unusual home, until the birth of the first child. Since
then it has been a fight for health, with the pall of her family's
history smothering each rekindling hope. Operations and sanatoria,
health-resorts and specialists have not restored, and she lives, a
neurasthenic mother of two neurotic children. Happiness has long fled
the home where it so loved to bide those early days, before the strain
and stress of maternity had drained the mother's poor reserve of
vitality.

The history of Will and John, named for the two uncles, would prove
racy reading through many chapters. "The Twins" were the father's text
for spicy stories galore many years before their death. From the
first, they were "two young sinners." They both had active minds--
overactive in devising deviltry. Mischievous as little fellows, never
punished, practically never corrected by their father, humored by
sisters, house-servants, and the plantation-hands, feared and admired
by other boys, they seemed proof against any helpful influence from
the earnest, pained, prayerful mother. As boys of ten, they had become
"town talk" and were held responsible for all pranks and practical
jokes perpetrated in Donaldsville or thereabout, unless other guilty
ones were captured red-handed. Multiply your conception of a "bad boy"
by two and you will have Will at twelve; repeat the process and you
will have John. They possessed one quality--dare we call it virtue?--
which kept them dear to Doctor Jim's heart through their very worst.
They never lied to him, no matter what their misdeeds. They could lie
as veritable troopers, but from him the truth in its rankest boldness