TESTATOR’S JOY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 257, 27 September 1935, Page 14

TESTATOR’S JOY

QUEER WILLS. Among the pleasures of old age few can compare with that of will-making. To insert, to strike out, to insert again, to devise conditions and to tighten them up, to study expectant faces and to keep people guessing, to drop half-hints and to lead the gullibly greedy up the garden path, these are tho pastimes that give savour to the most limited and invalid existences, says the London Times. There has just taken to the streets of Budapest a young man whose uncle’s will has left him £30,000, but on conditions. The fortune.may only come to him- after it lias been spent on firewood, and no one can eat firowood. The legatee can only sell the firewood after he has chopped it with his own hand, day by day, and he must sell it personally. Another nephew, and a lawyer at that, is appointed by the will to watch what happens, and himself, becomes the heir fb everything if he can prove a breach of tho conditions. It almost looks as though his uncle thought liis nephew inclined to indolence. The report says that they were not on friendly terms, .and the beneficiary should not complain too loudly. The Hungarian nephew has been fortunate to escape without any description of liis failings appearing in the ! will. The family gathering and the family lawyer’s voice have often proved an irresistible temptation for lively home truths. Few have been so sweeping as the Frenchman who loft all liis money to tho people of London and ordered his body to be buried at sea a mile from the English coast, roundly declaring the French to be “a nation of dastards and fools.” (The French Courts refused to invalidate the will or to say that lie must have been insane.) Perhaps the best implied criticism of everybody was that of the Finn who left his ali to the DeviT. The Courts would not uphold the bequest. But many a testator has commented in detail on the people with whom he has spent liis life, and there is no way of getting the Court to set aside an insult. Such wills must of course bo locked away with care until the great day. The story is on record of George Sand, who could not wait to open her husband’s will and discovered it to be full of curses aimed at her, whereupon s)ic left him and set up as authoress with a room of her own. What checks exuberance in wills more than anything else is the presence of solicitors, who arc not, as a tribe, kifted with flights of fancy or inclined to enter into the idea of making the world sit up. If it became more fashionable to take a pride in the literary aspects of the will—and it well might, for it is the best chance that most people have of compelling attention—a new profession for literary men and rhetoricians might emerge.