Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 3.djvu/324

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
 
m’arthur v. allen.
317

never accepted the trusts conferred upon them by the will, and declined to act.

The court ordered an issue to be made up touching the validity of the will. This was done, and it was submitted to a jury. The jury found against the will, and the court entered a decree accordingly. The decree gave the infant defendants until they should respectively attain to the age of 21 years and 6 months thereafter, and to the feme covert defendants respectively until they should become discovert and six months thereafter, to show cause against it. The proceedings were conducted in all respects with remarkable care and regularity.

This bill was filed by the children of Allen C. McArthur, who was the complainant in the bill to set the will aside. They were all born after that event. The husbands of such of them as are covert are also joined as complainants.

The bill is wholly silent as to the decree setting the will aside. It alleges that the complainant, Allen C. McArthur, is the last born of the grandchildren, and that he arrived at the age of 21 on the fourth day of March, 1875, and that the children of the testator are all dead. It alleges further that, upon the death of the testator, his children ignored the will and the rights of the grandchildren under it, and proceeded to appropriate to themselves all the lands in question by a proceeding in partition in the court of common pleas of Ross county. The prayer of the bill is that the defendants be required to account for the rents and profits of the lands; that it be decreed they hold their respective titles in trust for the grand and great grandchildren of the testator, according to the provisions of the will; that partition be made among those parties according to their several rights, and for general relief.

The defendants are very numerous. Eight of them are grandchildren, and four of them are great grandchildren, of the testator. The others are holders, by purchase, of the different portions of the premises described in the bill.

None of those to whom the right was reserved in the decree to come in thereafter and impeach it, ever availed