Curiosities of Olden Times Author:Sabine Baring-Gould Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: STRANGE WILLS Of course we ought to begin with Adam's will, the father of all wills ; and if we could produce that patriarchal document, we should undoubtedly... more » 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 asserts 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 pass 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 divisionfor 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 ...« less