After this speech there was not a man, not even a sub-lieutenant, who dared to empty his glass.
In spite of the respect with which he is surrounded—in spite of the title of El Verdugo (the executioner), bestowed upon him as a title of nobility by the King of Spain—the Marquis de Leganes is a prey to melancholy. He lives in solitude, and is rarely seen.
Overwhelmed with the load of his glorious crime, he seems only to await the birth of a second son, impatient to seek again the company of those Shades who are about his path continually.
The World's Richest Legacy.
Immured in an Asylum, a True Son of Nature Who Had Won Distinction
at the Bar Wrote a Will, Which Only the Divine Surrogate Can Set
Aside, Bequeathing Priceless Possessions to Mankind.
How few men know their riches! What is ours is ours only in so far as we are conscious of it, and so that which we accept without thought, which has no especial meaning to us, is not a real possession. You may have three or four hundred leaves of paper, covered with rows of printed characters and bound together between boards of leather, and yet you may not own a book.
Do you look upon the mountain and the stream and exclaim: "These are mine!" If not, then you have ignored Nature's dower to you. Do you realize that your individual possession in art is as broad as art itself? If not, you are refusing man's free gift to man. It is easy for almost any man or woman to be rich; the only thing that is hard is to learn to know real gold when you see it.
The most sensible will ever written was made by an insane man. He was Charles Lounsberry, once a prominent member of the Chicago bar, who in his later years lost his mind and was committed to the Cook County Asylum, at Dunning, where he died penniless. If he had lost his mind, he had kept his heart, or at least in his last moments he was endowed with a lucidity that was higher than logic. For this strange man, penniless though he was, knew that he was yet rich, and he made a will which, as the Chicago Record-Herald said, was "framed with such perfection of form and detail that no flaw could be found in its legal phraseology or matters."
Inasmuch as poor, mad Charles Lounsberry knew gold from dross, we here reprint his curious and interesting will.