“Then this is what I read,” said I, taking up my own transcript:—
“Note.—This is to remind me, if I feel my death nigh, that I had better move to Birmingham, as burials are done cheaper there than here, where the terms of the Necropolis Company are exorbitant.”
Fletcher bounded from his seat. “The old skinflint! miser! screw!”
“A very estimable and thrifty man, your great-uncle.”
“Confounded old stingy—,” and he slammed the door upon himself and the substantive which designated his uncle.
And now, the very best advice I can give to my readers, is to set to work at once on the simple cypher given near the commencement of this paper, and to find it out.
STRANGE WILLS
Of course we ought to begin with Adam’s will, the father of all wills; and if we could produce that patriarchal document, we should undoubtedly find in it the germs of all the merits, faults, and eccentricities of wills to come. But, unfortunately, though a testament of Adam does exist, it is a forgery; and nothing will convince us to the contrary,—not even the Mussulman tradition, which asserts that on the occasion of our great forefather beginning to make his bequests, seventy legions of angels brought him sheets of paper and quill pens, nicely nibbed, all the way from Paradise; and that the Archangel Gabriel set-to his seal as witness. What! four hundred and twenty thousand sheets of paper!—surely a needless consumption of material, when there was nothing to be bequeathed but a view over the hedge of an impracticable garden.