The strength of the Barnum legend did not diminish as Barnum’s own powers began to decay. He still received letters from everywhere, offering him services and curiosities, and it was a source of great pride to him that some of these letters were addressed merely, “Barnum, America.” A man from Orleans County, New York, wrote: “I can remove the effulgence from the disk of the sun with the magic power that I possess. If you want to see it done, if you will write me a line and state the time, I will perform this feat ten times in half an hour. From 5 to 6 is the best time. My own family don’t know I possess this power. You will say this is a big humbug, but it is no humbug. If you don’t want to put this on exhibition, you will do me a favor by saying nothing about it.” Another correspondent offered himself “with confidence as being the ugliest man beyond question in the United States or Canada. I have resided many years in this State, and am universally acknowledged by travelers and residents as the ugliest man ever seen. Yet there is nothing repulsive in my appearance. I am naturally lazy, and desire a job that does not require much exertion.” A friend urged Barnum in a letter to open a permanent museum in New York City, and though he admitted in his reply that it should be successful because “there is really _no fit place for children_ to go to be amused in N. Y. City, and adults will go where children do,” he feared he was too old to start a new project. He preferred the tranquillity of his Bridgeport home, where he could look upon his thriving shade trees and the avenues he had laid out, realizing, as he wrote, that “wherever art has beautified nature, it has but utilized plans and carried out suggestions of my own.” CHAPTER XV “NOT MY WILL, BUT THINE, BE DONE” In November of 1890, when he was eighty years old, Barnum suffered an attack of acute congestion of the brain, which kept him in bed for three weeks, and the physicians decided that this was his last illness. He had prepared for that possibility in detail. Before making his final will he called in a horde of physicians to testify to his sound mental condition, because the relatives of a Bridgeport friend, who had recently died, contested the will. In this lawsuit Barnum had been called as a witness of Captain Brooks’s mental condition. He replied that he thought the mind of the deceased was as sound as that of any rich man who has poor relations. He himself was determined by this example to frustrate any chance of dissension after his death, and his will provided that contestants were to be deprived of their bequests; his will also set aside a fund of $100,000 to be used in fighting contests.