Varadachariar, J.

1. These appeals arise out of suits instituted by different plaintiffs against the same defendant, for varying sums of money claimed to be due under promissory notes executed by the defendants. As the defence was to a certain extent common to all the suits they were tried together and the whole evidence for the defendants was recorded in O.S. No. 42 of 1927 (A.S. No. 250 of 1930). In two of the suits, the defendant admitted receipt of small sums and to that extent those suits were decreed; the other two suits were dismissed.

2. The defendant is the youngest son of a rich Vysia family of Cocanada. Born in July 1907 he was married in 1921 into a rich family of Akkiveedu and his wife joined him early in 1925. Nevertheless, in the course of 1926, he seems to have taken to bad ways, with the help and under the evil influence of two of his fathers dismissed clerks - Bhaskara Row and Majeti Venkataramana - and one Immidi Sooryam, the husband of a deceased sister. The transactions which led to these suits took place between September 1926 and May 1927, and as the lower Court points out, the defendant must, according to the tenor of these pro-notes, have borrowed mor