Top Course Unit 191

Presentations: The Top Course Unit 191

Listen to the recordings to practice this study group.
Repeat each line after the speaker.
Practice one group at a time.
Start with Part A Slow reading then Part A Normal speed. Then go on to Part B.

Unit 191 Part A

1 'Whatever happened to Baby Doe?' is a question often asked by visitors to Leadville ...
2 and the answer, I'm afraid, is not a happy one!
3 The Tabors were reduced to destitution.
4 Horace had to work as a day labourer to save his wife and two daughters from starving.
5 In 1899, an old friend managed to get him appointed postmaster of Denver
6 and his fortunes briefly revived.
7 But he died a year later.
8 His last words to Baby Doe were, 'Don't give up the mine.'
9 This is where the story becomes a tragedy.
10 The former courtesan, who had spent 17,000 dollars on her daughter's christening robe ...
11 and had given her 100 peacocks as pets, moved back to Leadville ...
12 and devoted the rest of her life to working the Matchless.
 

Unit 191 Part B

 

13 She became a wild eccentric, a bag lady who sailed forth every few months ...
14 to try to raise money from the bankers in Leadville and Denver to reopen the mine.
15 Eventually, she moved with her daughters to a shack at the mine head -
16 a small squalid building exposed to the elements,
17 whose walls she pasted with pictures of her days of glory, cut out from magazines.
18 The oldest daughter ran away.
19 The younger, Silver Dollar, who had inherited her mother's youthful morals …
20 but none of her later obduracy, died an alcoholic in Chicago in 1925.
21 Still Baby Doe tried to work the mine, descending into the depths itself,
22 well into her seventies, trying in vain to find the new silver lode …
23 which would restore her fortunes.
24 She finally died an old, mad recluse,
25 frozen to death aged 80, in a blizzard, in 1935.

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