future; and, for a beginning, to go through her deeds and papers, and arrange them all for her in the iron chest which she kept at her own house. My investigation of her papers showed me that she was possessed of considerable property, acquired by her in the course of carrying on a good business as a milliner and dressmaker in the old days, before large cooperative stores were thought of; after she had retired from active business she invested her money judiciously by lending it out at good interest on small mortgages, reinvesting a goodly part of the interest; she was, consequently, in constant need of a soli citor to look after her business; and she be came a profitable client. But there was a strange reserve about her which forbade anything like an approach to personal intimacy; our interviews were strictly confined to the business in hand. On one occasion I ventured to go outside the subject in hand, and to advise her that, having no relations in the first degree, she ought to make a will so as to leave all her affairs in order whenever her time came to leave the world; I was abruptly told that when she con sulted me about making a will it would be time enough to give her my advice about it; so I dropped the subject quickly, with an apology. Soon after this she sent for me again, and I could see that she was under some little excitement. She told me that she had an only sister, living elsewhere, who was separated from her husband who had, as she told me, treated her badly; she read to me extracts from the deed of separation, and said that her sister wanted advice about her right under it of making a will; and as to what would happen in the event of her dying without making one. I took a careful note of the wording of the deed as she read it to me; it was rather clumsily drawn; it pro vided for the husband receiving an annuity from the wife so long as he lived and did not molest the wife, or the son who was the only child of the marriage; and the wife, on her part, covenanted to maintain the son at her
own expense during his minority; and the husband, on his part, covenanted not to molest either the wife or the son; and further that the wife should, during her life, enjoy all her own property as fully as if she were a feme sole, and should have power to dispose there of by will; but the deed did not specifically provide that in the event of her dying intes tate her property should pass to her own next of kin as if she had never been married. I, of course, advised that in view of the am biguity of the language used it was of the utmost importance that her sister should make a will; otherwise the husband might on her intestacy claim everything as her sole next of kin. She thereupon asked me to draw out a will for her sister to sign, providing for the annuity being paid to the husband during the rest of his life, with a trust over in the event of his becoming deprived of the bene fit of the annuity by act of law, or of any attempt to alien or anticipate the payments; and, subject to the annuity, there was to be a bequest of everything to the son abso lutely. Some few years after this she again sent for me, and I found her strangely excited. She asked me if I could recall from memory the terms of the will which I had drawn up for her sister to sign, and I was able to tell her that (thanks to my fussy fidgetting habits) I could at once lay my hand on the draft of the will and, if need be, make a perfect copy of it; and I began asking her some questions about her sister which I found she tried to evade answering. At last, however, she told me frankly that her sister was only a myth ical person, and that (as some of my readers may have been sharp enough to suspect, though I confess I myself had not) she had, in telling me her supposed sister's history, told me the secret of her own life. Poor soul! Fate had indeed dealt hardly with her. She had married early in life a handsome but worthless fellow, whom she had supported by her own industry in the first years of their married life, and who had deserted her, soon
