Of course if young people allow their conduct to be in any way influenced
by regard to the wills of living persons they are doing very wrong and
must expect to be sufferers in the end, nevertheless the powers of will-
dangling and will-shaking are so liable to abuse and are continually made
so great an engine of torture that I would pass a law, if I could, to
incapacitate any man from making a will for three months from the date of
each offence in either of the above respects and let the bench of
magistrates or judge, before whom he has been convicted, dispose of his
property as they shall think right and reasonable if he dies during the
time that his will-making power is suspended.
Mr Pontifex would have the boys into the dining-room. "My dear John, my
dear Theobald," he would say, "look at me. I began life with nothing but
the clothes with which my father and mother sent me up to London. My
father gave me ten shillings and my mother five for pocket money and I
thought them munificent. I never asked my father for a shilling in the
whole course of my life, nor took aught from him beyond the small sum he
used to allow me monthly till I was in receipt of a salary.
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