and the poor child fairly melted away and was gone in a year.

Annabel, the youngest girl, was a quiet child and thoughtful. Some
called her dull, but rather, it seems, she early sensed her fate. When
but a child she was sent to "San Antone" and operated on by a throat
specialist. After May's death she went to the mountains each summer
and spent two winters in South Texas. But she grew more and more thin,
and in the end it was tuberculosis.

Frank, the last child, was different from all the others. He seemed
bright of mind and active of body. He attended school as had none of
the other boys; he even went to Sunday-school. Physically and
mentally, he gave promise of prolonging the family line--but he proved
his father's only admitted regret. He lied and he stole. The money
which his father would have given him freely he preferred to get by
cunning. Doctor Jim could not tolerate what he called dishonesty, and
from time to time they would have words and Frank would be gone for
months. His cleverness made him a fairly successful gambler; that he
played the game "crooked" is probably evidenced by his being shot in a
gambling-joint before he was thirty.

We have thus scanned the-wreckage of a generation bred in alcohol.
Children they were of unusual physical and mental parentage, parents
who never knowingly offended their consciences, children reared in
most healthful surroundings with every comfort and opportunity for
normal development. Four of them showed their physical inferiority
through the early infection and unusually poor resistance to
tuberculosis; one was born an imbecile; one died directly from the
effects of drink; the only girl who survived early maturity, the best
of them all, spent twenty years a nervous sufferer, mothering two