Nor is it surprising to find that another son, Nathaniel, “hath refused my correction,” and that he has an “unthankful and injurious brother.” “To my unthankful and injurious brother Simon Gill I freely forgive all debts which he oweth me, with all demands for other charges of food apparel losses and supplies in his want by which I have been much damnified by him, which in a most charitable accompt would come to above fifty pounds; I forgive, I say, all most freely except one bill of eight pounds, which debt I give to my executrix, with hope she will not be troublesome to him by suit thereof except he become troublesome unto her or her children as his manner hath been towards me and others.” There are other interesting passages, but as a final touch to the will of this stormy nature it may be noticed that he gives “the dust of this wicked carcase to be buried in the dust.” Altogether his will confirms the opinion of Aubrey in his “Brief Lives,” that “Dr. Gill, the father, was a very ingeniose person, as may appear by his writings. Notwithstanding he had moodes and humours.” Sometimes the circumstances suggest romance. “On the morning of the action between the Portland packet and the Temeraire French privateer, off Guadaloupe, on the 14th of October, 1796,” says Kirby’s “Wonderful Museum” (1803), “Mr. Cunningham, a passenger, who, in a previous engagement sustained by the Portland packet with another privateer, had evinced great courage, observed to the captain that he felt a strong impression that his dissolution was at hand; and on the enemy bearing in sight, he went below and made his will, declaring his hour was come; returning to his station on deck, in a few minutes a bullet verified his prediction.” So it has been again and again, from the case of Mary Stuart, writing her will in her own hand during the last hours before her execution, or of Archbishop Laud drawing up his will in the Tower, to the case of Señor Ferrer, dictating his testament in the prison chapel at Barcelona. II Strange histories, it will be seen, lie behind wills, dull and similar as at first sight the majority appears. The history may not always be explicit, but the suggestion conveyed by some gift or revocation, some phrase or fact, may often be completed by the reader’s imagination. So Dorothy Skipwith, of Catesby, in Lincolnshire (will dated 1677), “did revoke and declare void the legacy of twenty guineas mentioned to be given to Mr. Shomoon, a Frenchman living in Whitehall, which she said she so revoked in regard he refused to come to her in the time of her sickness.”