This is enough, and perhaps more than enough, about Wills in fiction; but Wills in real life are fully as interesting. The late Sir Charles Butt, who presided over the Divorce Court and the Probate Court, once told me that, though the aspect of human nature which is exhibited in Divorce is not ideally beautiful, it is far less repulsive than that which is disclosed by Probate. None of the stories which one has read about forged wills, forced wills, wills made under pressure, wills made under misrepresentation, are too strange to be true. A century ago the daughter of a great landowner in the North of England succeeded to his wealth under circumstances which, to put it mildly, caused surprise. In later life she had a public quarrel with a high-born but intemperate dame, who concluded the colloquy by observing, with mordant emphasis, "Well, at any rate I didn't hold my dying father's hand to make him sign a will he never saw, and then murder the Butler to prevent his telling." "Ouida," or Miss Braddon, or some other novelist of High Life might, I think, make something of this scene. Spiteful Wills--wills which, by rehearsing and revoking previous bequests, mortify the survivors when the testator is no longer in a position to do so _viva voce_--form a very curious branch of the subject. Lord Kew was a very wealthy peer of strict principles and peculiarly acrid temper, and, having no wife or children to annoy, he "took it out," as the saying is, of his brothers, nephews, and other expectant kinsfolk. One gem from his collection I recall, in some such words as these: "By a previous will I had left £50,000 to my brother John; but, as he has sent his son to Oxford instead of Cambridge, contrary to my expressed wish, I reduce the legacy to £500." May the earth lie light on that benevolent old despot! Eccentricities of bequest, again, might make a pleasant chapter. The present writer, though not yet in tottering age, can recall an annuitant whose claim to £20 a year was founded (in part) on the skill with which he had tied his master's pigtail, and that master died in 1830. The proverbial longevity of annuitants was illustrated in the case of a grey parrot, for whose maintenance his departed mistress left £10 a year. The bird was not very young when the annuity began to accrue; and, as years went on and friends dropped off, he began to feel the loneliness of his lot. With a tenderness of heart which did them infinite credit, the good couple to whose care the bird had been left imported a companion exactly like himself to cheer his solitude. Before long one of the parrots died, and the mourners remarked that these younger birds had not half the constitution of the older generation. So, as long as they lived, the parrot lived, and the pension lived also.