Curiosities of Olden Times Part 3

"88 and 22," said my friend Mat.

"And please observe," I continued, "that where I draw a line and write A you have e, then double t, then e again. Probably this is the middle of a word, and as we have already supposed 2 to stand for t, we have--ette--, a very likely combination. We may be sure of the t now. Near the end of the third line, there is a remarkable pa.s.sage, in which the three letters we know recur continually. Let us write it out, leaving blanks for the letters we do not know, and placing the ascertained letters instead of their symbols. Then it stands--e?the?eth--he?ehe? ethe--. Now here I have a ? repeated four times, and from its position it must be a consonant. I will put in its place one consonant after another. You see r is the only one which turns the letters into words.--_erthereth--here_ . _here the--_surely some of these should stand out distinctly separated--_er there th-- here_ . _here the_. Look! I can see at once what letters are wanting; _th--_ between _there_ and _here_ must be _than_, and then ? _here_ is, must be, _where_. So now I have found these letters,

8 = e, r = t, -- = h, ? = r, -- = a, + = n, ? = w,

and I can confirm the ? as _r_ by taking the portion marked A_--etter_.

Here we get an end of an adjective in the comparative degree; I think it must be _better_."

"Let us next take a group of cyphers higher up; I will pencil over it D. I take this group because it contains some of the letters which we have settled _--eathn_. Eath must be the end of a word, for none begins with athn, thn, or hn. Now what letter will suit eath? Possibly _h_, probably _d_."

"Yes," exclaimed Fletcher, "_Death_, to be sure. I can guess it all: 'Death is approaching, and I feel that a solemn duty devolves upon me, namely, that of acquainting Matthew Fletcher, my heir, with the spot where I have hidden my savings.' Go on, go on."

"All in good time, friend," I laughed. "You observe we can confirm our guess as to the sign ) being used for _d_, by comparing the pa.s.sage--29----)*8228?, which we now read, _t. had better_. But _t. had better_ is awkward; you cannot make 9 into _o_; 'to had,' would be no sense."

"Of course not," burst forth Fletcher. "Don't you see it all? _I had better_ let my excellent nephew know where I have deposited----"

"Wait a bit," interrupted I; "you are right, I believe. _I_ is the signification of 9. Let us begin the whole cryptograph now:--_N.tethi.i.t.re.ind.e._"

"_Remind me!_" cried Fletcher.

"You have it again," said I. "Now we obtain an additional letter besides _m_, for _t. remind me_ is certainly _to remind me_. We must begin again:--_Note thi.i. to remind me_."

"_This is_," called out my excited friend, whose eyes were sparkling with delight and expectation. "Go on; you are a trump!"

"These, then, are our additional letters:--) = d, 7 = m, = s, 9 = i, ?

= o. _To remind me i.i. ee. m. death ni.h_; for _m. death_, I read _my death_, and _i.i. ee._, I guess to be, _if I feel_. So it stands thus:--'Note.--This is to remind me, if I feel my death nigh, that I had better----'"

I worked on now in silence; Fletcher, leaning his chin on his hands, sat opposite, staring into my face with breathless anxiety. Presently I exclaimed:

"Halves, Mat! I think you said halves!"

"I--I--I--I--my very dear fellow, I----"

"A very excellent man was your uncle; a most exemplary----"

"All right, I know that," said Fletcher, cutting me short. "Do read the paper; I have a spade and pick on my library table, all ready for work the moment I know where to begin."

"But, really, he was a man in a thousand, a man of such discretion, such foresight, so much----"

Down came Fletcher's hand on the desk.

"Do go on!" he cried; and I could see that he was swearing internally; he would have sworn _ore rotundo_, only that it would have been uncivil, and decidedly improper.

"Very well; you are prepared to hear all?"

"All! by Jove! by Jingo! prepared for everything."

"Then this is what I read," said I, taking up my own transcript:--

"_Note.--This is to remind me, if I feel my death nigh, that I had better move to Birmingham, as burials are done cheaper there than here, where the terms of the Necropolis Company are exorbitant._"

Fletcher bounded from his seat. "The old skinflint! miser! screw!"

"A very estimable and thrifty man, your great-uncle."

"Confounded old stingy--," and he slammed the door upon himself and the substantive which designated his uncle.

And now, the very best advice I can give to my readers, is to set to work at once on the simple cypher given near the commencement of this paper, and to find it out.

STRANGE WILLS

Of course we ought to begin with Adam's will, the father of all wills; and if we could produce that patriarchal doc.u.ment, we should undoubtedly find in it the germs of all the merits, faults, and eccentricities of wills to come. But, unfortunately, though a testament of Adam does exist, it is a forgery; and nothing will convince us to the contrary,--not even the Mussulman tradition, which a.s.serts that on the occasion of our great forefather beginning to make his bequests, seventy legions of angels brought him sheets of paper and quill pens, nicely nibbed, all the way from Paradise; and that the Archangel Gabriel set-to his seal as witness.

What! four hundred and twenty thousand sheets of paper!--surely a needless consumption of material, when there was nothing to be bequeathed but a view over the hedge of an impracticable garden.

If we pa.s.s to Noah's testament, we are again among the apocrypha. In it, Noah portions his landed property, the globe, into three shares, one for each son: America is not included in the division for obvious reasons. It was left for "manners" sake, and manners has never got it.

The testament of the twelve Patriarchs must be glanced at, which is received as semi-canonical by the Armenian Church, though it is unquestionably apocryphal. Reuben speaks of sleep as having been in Paradise, only a sweet ecstasy; whereas, after the Fall, it has become a continually recurring image of death. Simeon bewails his former hostility to Joseph; and relates, that his brother's bones were preserved in the Royal treasury of Egypt. Levi is oracular; Judah rejoices in the sceptre left to his race; Issachar unfolds the future of the Jews; Zebulun relates that the brethren supplied themselves with shoes from the money which they got by the sale of Joseph. There seems to be some allusion to this tradition in the Prophet Amos (ii. 6; viii. 6). Dan recommends his posterity to practise humility; Naphtali sees visions; Gad is contrite; Asher prophesies the coming of the Messiah; Joseph, the incarnation; Benjamin, the destruction of the Temple.

There exists a very curious and ancient testament of Job, which was discovered and published by Cardinal Ma, in 1839; it relates many details which we may look for in vain in the Canonical Book. In it Job's faithful wife, when reduced to the utmost poverty, sells the hair of her head to procure bread for her husband.

What a remarkable doc.u.ment a will is! It is the voice of a man now dead, coming back in the hush of a darkened house--from the vault, low and hoa.r.s.e as an echo. It speaks, and people hearken; it commands, and people obey; law supports and enforces its wishes; no power on earth can alter it. We expect to hear the voice calm, earnest, and speaking true judgment; terrible indeed if it breaks out with a snarl of hate--more terrible still if it gibbers and laughs a hollow, ghost-like laugh. For, surely, the most solemn moment of a life is that when the will is written: that will, which is to speak for man when the voice is pa.s.sed as a dream; when the heart which devises it has ceased to throb; the head which frames it has done with thinking--under the fresh mould; the hand which pens it has been pressed, thin and white, against a cold shroud, to moulder with it; surely he who, at such a moment, can write words of hate must have a black heart, but he who ventures then to gibe and jest must have no heart at all.

There is some truth in the old ghost-creed; man _can_ return after death; he does so in his will. He comes to some, as Jupiter came to Danae, in a shower of gold; to others, as a blighting spectre, whose promised treasures turn to dust. What excitement the reading of a will causes in a family! and what interest does the world at large take in the bequests of a person of position! The last words of great men seem always to have possessed a peculiar value in the eyes of the people.

"Live, Brutus, live!" shouts the Roman mob in _Julius Caesar_; but on hearing what Caesar's will promises, how

To every Roman citizen he gives,-- To every several man,--seventy-five drachmas.

His private arbours, and new-planted orchards, On this side Tiber: he hath left them you, And to your heirs for ever;----

then the mob changes note, and with one voice shouts, "To Brutus, to Ca.s.sius;--burn all!"

Testamenta hominum speculum esse morum vulgo creditur.--Plin. jun., 8 Ess. 18.

So they are! They are the last touch of the brush in the great picture of civilisation, manners, and customs, lightening it up.

Would that s.p.a.ce permitted me to enter into the history of wills: a few curious particulars alone can we admit.

To die without having made a will was formerly regarded with horror. A very common custom in the Middle Ages was that of leaving considerable benefactions to the Church. This was well enough, but the clergy were not satisfied until it was made compulsory.

Ducange says that neglect of leaving to the Church indicated a profanity which deserved punishment by a refusal of the rites of the last sacraments and burial. The clergy of Brittany, in the fourteenth century, claimed a third of the household goods; the death-bed became ecclesiastical property in the diocese of Auxerre; and Clement V. settled the claims of the Church by deciding that the parish priest might take as his perquisite a ninth of all the movables in the house of the dead man, after the debts of the deceased had been paid off.

A sufficiency of historical notes. I will proceed at once--perhaps somewhat strangely--to give the reader a specimen of a will coming decidedly under the heading of this article. It is that of a _Pig_. The will is ancient enough. S. Jerome, in his "Promium on Isaiah," speaks of it, saying, that in his time (fourth century) children were wont to sing it at school, amidst shouts of laughter. Alexander Bra.s.sica.n.u.s, who died in 1539, was the first to publish it; he found it in a MS. at Mayence.

Later, G. Fabricius gave a corrected edition of it from another MS. found at Memel, and, since then, it has been in the hands of the learned. The original is in Latin; I translate, modifying slightly one expression and omitting one bequest:

I, M. Grunnius Corocotta Porcellus, have made my testament, which, as I can't write myself, I have dictated.