“I direct that my body be placed in a pine box not to cost more than five dollars; placed in an express wagon and taken to a crematory; that after cremation, the ashes shall be scattered in a field. The entire cost of the disposal of my body is not to exceed fifty dollars. My reason is, that I believe a man gets out of life all that he is entitled to, according to the amount of brain and energy he puts into it, and when he dies, should not occupy ground that may be needed for highways, or for planting corn, or for any other purpose that future generations may have for it. I believe that when I die my money, if I have any, should go to those dependent upon me, and not into expensive coffins and flowers.”
Took no Chances
A horror of being buried alive so haunted Mr. R. of Chicago that on his death he left minute instructions in his will to make such a fate quite impossible in his case. His body was not to be fastened up in his coffin till thirty days after his funeral, and the vault in which the body was placed was to be kept lighted and its doors left unlocked. Provision was also made for the employment of two men—trusted employees of the deceased—who were to guard the entrance, one by day and the other by night.
Her Carriages burned and Horses Shot
Quite a number of men, both Americans and Englishmen, who have spent a great part of their lives in hunting, have wished to be buried in their hunting dress, and this desire has been shared by at least one woman. An eccentric Welsh lady, who lived at a small place called Llanrug, was buried there in 1895 in accordance with the provisions of her will, which was in keeping with the local estimate of her character. She wished to be buried in her foxhunting clothes. The rest of her clothes and her carriages were to be burned on the day of her funeral, and all her horses—six in number, varying in value from £60 to £90 each—were to be shot on the day following the funeral. The remainder of her real and personal property to the value of £90,000 was left to her “dear husband,”—a former laborer on her estate, with whom some years previously she had, on her own suggestion, contracted a marriage,—provided that he strictly and literally carried out all the orders expressed in her will.
Funeral cost Six Francs
Some very rich men during their lives seem to enjoy the luxury of preparing at great expense the mausoleums they wish to occupy after death. M. Lalanne, a wealthy Parisian, went to the other extreme. He had a horror of anything like ostentatious funerals, and after bequeathing over a million francs to the various public institutions of his native city, he directed that his body be buried as cheaply as possible—in fact, like that of a pauper. A shabby one-horse vehicle conveyed his body to the fosse commune (the Potter’s Field), and the total cost of the funeral was only six francs, that being the charge for the cheapest kind of funeral under the French system, in which the undertaker’s business is a government monopoly.
A Woman Hater
Altogether unique was the whim of a rich old bachelor, who, having endured much from “attempts made by my family to put me under the yoke of matrimony,” conceived and nursed such an antipathy to the fair sex as to impose upon his executors the duty of carrying out what is probably the most ungallant provision ever contained in a will. The words are as follows: “I beg that my executors will see that I am buried where there is no woman interred, either to the right or to the left of me. Should this not be practicable in the ordinary course of things, I direct that they purchase three graves, and bury me in the middle one of the three, leaving the two others unoccupied.”
With the Saints on Bardsey Island