“Ah, well, I know we ought,” he admitted, “but I do so object to the literary style of wills.”
It has long been a sadness of ours that the law makes all the poor dead talk alike in this last office of the human pleasure, so that cartman and potentate and philosopher give away their chattels to the same dreary choice of forms. No matter with what charming propriety they have in life written little letters to accompany gifts, most sensitively shading the temper of bestowal, yet in the majesty of their passing they are forced into a very strait-jacket of phrasing so that verily, to bequeath a thing to one’s friend is well-nigh to throw it at him. Yes, one of the drawbacks to dying is the diction of wills.
Pelleas meditated for a moment and then laughed out.
“Telegrams,” said he, “are such a social convenience in life that I don’t see why they don’t extend their function. Then all we should need would be two witnesses, ready for anything, and some yellow telegraph blanks, and a lawyer to file the messages whenever we should die, telling all our friends what we wish them to have.”
At once we fell planning the telegrams, quite as if the Eye of the Law knew what it is to wrinkle at the corners.
As,
Mrs. Lawrence Knight,
Little Rosemont,
L.I.
I wish you to have my mother’s pearls and her mahogany and my Samarcand rug and my Langhorne Plutarch and a kiss.
Aunt Etarre.