had accumulated around him. On the 24th of November, 1683, as we have
seen, he was "sick in bed." Two days before,--that is, on the 22d of
November,--he had made his will, which was presented in court on the
27th of March, 1684. He was game to the last; for this is an item of
the will:--

"Whereas my late father, by his last will, bequeathed to me
his farm called Bishop's or Chickering's farm, I do give the
said farm to my five sons, to be equally divided among
them."

The will of his father had been declared invalid on that point, and
others. The whole thing had been conclusively settled for years; but
he never would recognize the fact. It is a singular instance of an
obstinacy of will completely superseding and suppressing the reason
and the judgment. He lost the perception of the actual and real, in
clinging to what he felt to be the right.

Every association and sentiment of his soul had been shocked by the
wrongs he had suffered. He could not walk over his fields, or look
from his windows, without feeling that a property which his father had
given to his brother had, in a manner that he knew would have been as
odious to that father as it was to him, passed into the hands of
strangers, and been used as a wedge on which everybody had conspired
to deal blows, driving it into the centre of his patrimonial acres,
splitting and rending them through and through. He brooded over the
thought, until, whenever his mind was turned to it, his reason was
dethroned, his heart broken, and under its weight he fell into his
grave.