velopes,
and six postage stamps. Mr Meggs surveyed them calmly.

He would not have admitted it, but he had had a lot of fun writing
those letters. The deliberation as to who should be his heirs had
occupied him pleasantly for several days, and, indeed, had taken his
mind off his internal pains at times so thoroughly that he had
frequently surprised himself in an almost cheerful mood. Yes, he would
have denied it, but it had been great sport sitting in his arm-chair,
thinking whom he should pick out from England's teeming millions to
make happy with his money. All sorts of schemes had passed through his
mind. He had a sense of power which the mere possession of the money
had never given him. He began to understand why millionaires make freak
wills. At one time he had toyed with the idea of selecting someone at
random from the London Directory and bestowing on him all he had to
bequeath. He had only abandoned the scheme when it occurred to him that
he himself would not be in a position to witness the recipient's
stunned delight. And what was the good of starting a thing like that,
if you were not to be in at the finish?

Sentiment succeeded whimsicality. His old friends of the office--those
were the men to benefit. What good fellows they had been! Some were
dead, but he still kept intermittently in touch with half a dozen of
them. And--an important point--he knew their present addresses.

This point was important, because Mr Meggs had decided not to leave a
will, but to send the money direct to the beneficiaries. He knew what
wills were. Even in quite straightforward circumstances they often made
trouble. There had been some slight complication about his own legacy
twenty years ago. Somebody had contested the will, and before the thing
was satisfactorily settled the lawyers had got away with about twenty
per cent of the whole. No, no wills. If he made one, and then killed
himself, it might be upset on a plea of insanity. He knew of no
relative who might consider himself entitled to the money, but there
was the chance that some remote cousin existed; and then the comrades
of his youth might fail to collect after all.

He declined to run the risk. Quietly and by degrees he had sold out the
stocks and shares in which his fortune was invested, and deposited the
money in his London bank. Six piles of large notes, dividing the total
into six equal parts; six letters couched in a strain of reminiscent
pathos and manly resign