ROMANCE OF A WILL.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1669, 1 February 1917, Page 4

ROMANCE OF A WILL.

STRANGE HIDING PLACE. Details of the discovery of a will in a strange hiding-place were made known at Penrith. On August 10th there died at the Patlerdale Ilotdl, Uliswater, an old gentleman named Dr. Peter Quin Keegan. He had lived in the dale for a good many years, but little was known about him except that his father had been a member of the firm of Keegan, Graham and Co., wine merchants, Belfast. Dr. Keegan was an LL.D. of Dublin University, and was keenly interested in geology, botany, and arboriculture, on which he wrote numerous papers for the technical journals. Some time before his death he met Mr Ronald Ellwood, traveller for a Penrith drapery (irm, and a friendship sprang up, based on their botanical' studies. Dr. Keegan gave him a book on the subject, but Mr Ellwood had no occasion to refer to it until a few days ago. He then found that two of the pages were fastened together, and outside one of (hem was an instruction in Dr. Keegan’s willing that the pages were not to be opened until after his death. Accordingly Mr Ellwood opened the pages and found between them the old gentleman’s will. The document left legacies to two Patterdale ladies and to his two sisters, and the residue to Mr Ellwood. It has been pronounced by solicitors to be quite in order except that nothing can be found as to the identity of the two witnesses, but, as the will was made last dune, while Dr. Keegan was temporarily staying in Penrith, he is assumed to have met them accidentally in the town. Rumour places the doctor's possessions at £30,000, but at present application has only been made for probate on his English estate, amounting to £2,100. He owned considerable property in Armagh and Belfast.