n of Nature Who Had Won Distinction
at the Bar Wrote a Will, Which Only the Divine Surrogate Can Set
Aside, Bequeathing Priceless Possessions to Mankind.

How few men know their riches! What is ours is ours only in
so far as we are conscious of it, and so that which we
accept without thought, which has no especial meaning to us,
is not a real possession. You may have three or four hundred
leaves of paper, covered with rows of printed characters and
bound together between boards of leather, and yet you may
not own a book.

Do you look upon the mountain and the stream and exclaim:
"These are mine!" If not, then you have ignored Nature's
dower to you. Do you realize that your individual possession
in art is as broad as art itself? If not, you are refusing
man's free gift to man. It is easy for almost any man or
woman to be rich; the only thing that is hard is to learn to
know real gold when you see it.

The most sensible will ever written was made by an insane
man. He was Charles Lounsberry, once a prominent member of
the Chicago bar, who in his later years lost his mind and
was committed to the Cook County Asylum, at Dunning, where
he died penniless. If he had lost his mind, he had kept his
heart, or at least in his last moments he was endowed with a
lucidity that was higher than logic. For this strange man,
penniless though he was, knew that he was yet rich, and he
made a will which, as the Chicago _Record-Herald_ said, was
"framed with such perfection of form and detail that no flaw
could be found in its legal phraseology or matters."

Inasmuch as poor, mad Charles Lounsberry knew gold from
dross, we here reprint his curious and interesting will.

I, =Charles Lounsberry=, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, do
hereby make and publish this, my last will and testament, in order, as
justly as may be, to distribute my interest in the world among succeeding
men.

That part of my interest, which is known in law and recognized in the
sheep-bound volumes as my property, being inconsiderable and of none
account, I make no disposition of in this, my will. My right to live,
being but a life estate, is not at my disposal, but these things excepted,
all else in the world I now proceed to devise and bequeath.

=Item=: I give to good fathers and mothers in trust for their children,
all good little words