And so, in due course of time, the day for the funeral arrived. Now it is an acknowledged fact that funerals and weddings are the two dullest and most sombre occasions on which human creatures assemble themselves together, and are therefore equally insipid to describe; only a funeral labours under the additional disadvantage, that it is against every rule of good taste and right feeling to poke fun at it. We feel, therefore, that we have “our public” with us, when, without entering into detail, we beg them to consider Sir Thomas Crawley handsomely and appropriately interred, with the necessary amount of black crape, crocodile tears, and funereal foppery. After the ceremony was over, Mr. Selby ate an excellent luncheon at the expense of the estate, to provide against the possible contingency of requiring the performance repeated on his own account, after a verdict of “died of inanition,” and then prepared to read the will--only, after searching high and low, and in every intermediate altitude, no will was forthcoming; so the next best thing was to inform a small and select coterie of ravening wolves, and daughters of the horse-leech, there met together in bombazine and black sheep’s-clothing (_alias_ broadcloth), and styling themselves relations of the dear departed (which in more senses than one, they certainly were), all that he (Selby) knew about the matter. This was--that since his accession to the Manor of Ashburn, Sir Thomas Crawley had made two wills:--the first bequeathing the bulk of the property to Mr. Peter Crawley, he had duly signed, sealed, and delivered the second he had never completed. That, when Sir Thomas, in his last illness, summoned Mr. Selby to Baden, he had desired him to bring with him three documents, viz., old Sir Ralph Carrington’s will, under which he had originally inherited the property; his own completed will; and the draught of the more recent one, then incomplete. That Sir Thomas had carefully-perused every clause of Sir Ralph’s will; then, begging Mr. Selby to take especial care of it, he desired him to destroy both the others in his presence; adding that they neither of them carried out his present intentions, and that, on his return to the Priory, he should give instructions for a fresh one. That he (Mr. Selby), declining to destroy the wills without witnesses of his doing so, by Sir Thomas Crawley’s express desire, the valet and the English physician were summoned, and in their presence he burned the wills. The property must, therefore, be disposed of according to the will of the late Sir Ralph Carrington.