In a recent will the testator wrote: “I do not leave any legacies to institutions. To those I am interested in I have given money time and labour during many years, and to others I have subscribed sufficiently. But if my children, who benefit under this my will, would give £100 to the Bluecoat School, in memory of me, it would please me, if there be any intercourse between this world and the next.” Whether there be any such intercourse, whether the dead ever attempt to modify human affairs, this is not the place to dogmatise. But no one can study human nature without noting such narratives. They are rooted deep in the soil. St. Augustine says beautifully, though not convincingly: “If the dead could come in dreams, my pious mother would no night fail to visit me. Far be the thought that she should, by a happier life, have been made so cruel that, when aught vexes my heart, she should not even console in a dream the son whom she loved with an only love.” But the negative proves nothing save our ignorance. And it is time to quit this by-way in wills.
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, WOKING AND LONDON.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Romance of Wills and Testaments, by Edgar Vine Hall