after moving; on one of these, in January 1880, Tom Horan saw him at the MCG during an intercolonial between Victoria and New South Wales. His alcoholism worsened over this period, as did Barbor's, also a heavy drinker. He occasionally coached the Heidelberg Cricket Club, its members composed mostly of farmers. On 13 March 1880, he played for the side against the Bohemians—a "travelling circus" of wealthy amateurs—in his last game. Wills took five wickets, his "chucks" working "sweetly" on the rough pitch. In his last surviving letters, sent two days later to his brothers on Cullin-la-ringo, he wrote that he felt "out of the world" in Heidelberg, and fantasised about escaping to Tasmania. Begging for money to help pay off debts, he promised, "I will not trouble any of you again". Suicide Isolated and estranged from most of his family, Wills had become, in the words of cricket historian David Frith, "a complete and dangerous and apparently incurable alcoholic". Oft-repeated stories that Wills ended up in gaol or at Kew Asylum near the end of his life are not supported by substantive evidence. He and Barbor abruptly stopped drinking on 28 April 1880; it is presumed that they ran out of money to buy more alcohol. Two days later, Wills started to show signs of alcohol withdrawal, and on 1 May, Barbor, fearing that a calamity was at hand, admitted him to the Melbourne Hospital, where a physician treated him for delirium tremens. Later that night, Wills absconded, returned home and the next day, in the grip of paranoid delusions, committed suicide by stabbing a pair of scissors into his heart three times. The inquest, on 3 May, presided over by coroner Richard Youl, found that Wills "killed himself when of unsound mind from excessive drinking". His burial took place the next day in an unmarked grave in Heidelberg Cemetery at a private funeral attended by only six people: his brother Egbert, sister Emily and cousin Harrison; Harrison's sister Adela and her son Amos; and cricketer Verney Cameron, who later ran an unsuccessful fundraiser for a tombstone over the grave. When asked by a journalist about her late son, Elizabeth Wills denied that Tom ever existed, and, according to family lore, she never spoke of him again. Personality Wills struck his contemporaries as peculiar and at times narcissistic, with a prickly temperament, but also kind, charismatic and companionable. Often