The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-06-29
ROMANGES OF WILLS.
"RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD"
 BELIEYED
He Had Inherited Vast Fortune.

slave among his ancestors. so the very poorest of us is more or less related to possessions which it is not hard to con vince us are wrongly held by others.
 Every family has it's tradition of this sort. which accounts, perhaps. for the readiness with which any improbable story is accepted telling Of miraculous fortunes suddenly thrown at heirs grown sick with hope deferred.
 The latest example of this sort con sists in a will" which tumbled from | the back of an old picture which it's ! owners were induced to believe would bring them property worth a million
 pounds sterling.
 That a modest sum in comparison
 with some which have recently ocu-
 pied the minds of fortune seekers. Not long ago Elisha Corey, of Omaha, Neb., arrived In London, armed, as he thought, with convincing proof of his title to the forty million pounds Co.,
 eyestate, which has been for sixty 1 five years in the Court of Chancery, and consists of stocks, bonds and
 gold" In spite of the most praiseworthy
 zeal MT, Corey could make no progress toward the realization of his claim; so he invoked the aid or Mf. Choate, the American ambassador in London. MT.
 Choate took up the matter and wrote
 to the Court of Chancery with the re- suit that he was informed that the Corey estate of forty million pounds had no existence in fact.
 Undeterred by so chilling a precedent
 as the foregoing, there came to Eng I land, a month or two later, Dr. J. P.
 Blackburn, of McKeesport, Pa, to
 claim, certain portions of England once owned by his ancestors, who had
 sailed in the good ship Mayfower.
 His researches brought to light collat-
 eraI branches of his family in the old
 country. They cherished the same
 traditions rSrith himself, and clearly
 showed that part of the family estat4s l had comprised the site of what is now l the prosperous cotton manufacturing l town of Blackburn. Altogether a sum of fifteen million pounds was at stake. l All that Dr. Blackburn was able to l achieve was the redemption of his
 family coat-of-arms from the College of Heralds. The rest of the Black burn possessions had all been legally
 and properly disposed of, and the due
 order of succession unimpeachably ob-
 served. 1 A Nlitcham family had as bootless 1 chase after smaller fortune, and in
 the end they had to take criminal pro I ceedings against the man who had in
 stigated the hunt and caused. expen- I allure of the sum in which they had
 been involved. Similar results attend 1 sd the ''Windfall'' of young man who
 produced a will endoWing him with I forty thousand pounds down and ten 1 thousand pounds a year, On the \ strength of the forged document he had proceeded literally to raise the l wind.'' i I Another such ruse placed the rich
 est man in the world, in felon's cell,
 where he languishes at this moment. l This was James Albert Marston, "the l Sheffield millionaire as he was more
 generally known At his trial for ob- tafning huge sums of money by false pretencss it was represented that he had really believed in the story of his l having inherited from a deceased un- cle an estate in Ontario half the size of 1 Ireland, upon which were gold and di-
 amond minss galore making him, as I the papers set forth at the time, the l richest man in the world. He lived in I the greatest luxury or the money bor- roWed on the strength of his great ex- I pactations, kept fast horses. wore the
 richest of garments, boasted of yachts and palaces and royal invitations, and went always armed with some half
 dozen revolvers.. In reality he was a
 draper's assistant earning thirty shil- @I lings a week. Now he is undergoing l three years penal servitude
 I A couple of years ago the Mile End
 Workhouse was ringing with the tid- ingsj that it entertained a millionair-
 ess. The heroine of the story certainly l lived up to the part. To the chaplain of the institution she presented her l EtwiIl' disposing of six hundred thou sand pounds nssums such as four hun i dred thousand dollars for the two con- I valescent homes, one hundred thou
 sand pounds for charitable institu- 1 tions, and so forth. Her bequests l were regarded as bona f1de, and the | lady had an innings of luxury and comfort. It all ended in the poliec court, where the lady was called to ac- 1 count for these said luxuries-for l which she had not paid nor hoped to 1 be able to do so.
 More recently still we had Pierre 1 Riera, the Spanish village blacksmith, figuring as claimant to the vast estate l o theMaTquis de Casa Riera. Hosts 1 Of people accepted the documents ael genuine u ntilfive months aga, when it was discovered that the potential mil lionaire was the unsophisticated tool of
 an interruptions band of adventurers by whom he and his sympathizers had
 been mercilessiy exploited.
 Some of these fortune hunts are the outcome of cruel hoaxes. Typical was
 the case of an old man named Good
 win, who, in answer to an advertise ment, sold all that he had in order to
 come from Australia to England to claim forty thousand pounds which it I was announced had been bequeathed l to him by his Uncle Holland" The
 matter came into the courts, when it
 was proved that there existed neither will nor thousands. The poor old man was now absolutely destitute, and only 70 ,1.s