When Keyser came home and found the churn still in action, he felt angry; and seizing the handle, he said he'd make the butter come if he stirred up an earthquake in doing it. Mr. Keyser effected about two hundred revolutions of the crank a minute—enough to have made any ordinary butter come from the ends of the earth; and when the perspiration began to stream from him, and still the butter didn't come, he uttered one wild yell of rage and disappointment and kicked the churn over the fence. When Mrs. Keyser went to pick it up, she put her nose down close to the buttermilk and took a sniff. Then she understood how it was. The girl had mixed the whitewash in the churn and left it there. A good, honest and intelligent servant who knows how to churn could have found a situation at Keyser's the next day. There was a vacancy.
Mr. Keyser during the summer made a very narrow escape from a melancholy ending. He dreamed one night that he would die on the 14th of September. So strongly was he assured of the fact that the vision would prove true that he began at once to make preparations for his departure. He got measured for a burial-suit, he drew up his will, he picked out a nice lot in the cemetery and had it fenced in, he joined the church and selected six of the deacons as his pall-bearers; he also requested the choir to sing at the funeral, and he got them to run over a favorite hymn of his to see how it would sound. Then he got Toombs, the undertaker, to knock together a burial-casket with silver-plated handles, and cushions inside, and he instructed the undertaker to use his best hearse, and to buy sixty pairs of black gloves, to be distributed among the mourners. He had some trouble deciding upon a tombstone. The man at the marble-yard, however, at last sold him a beautiful one with an angel weeping over a kind of a flower-pot, with the legend, "Not lost, but gone before."
Then he got the village newspaper to put a good obituary notice of him in type, and he told his wife that he would be gratified if she would come out in the spring and plant violets upon his grave. He said it was hard to leave her and the children, but she must try and bear up under it. These afflictions are for our good, and when he was an angel he would come and watch over her and keep his eye on her. He said she might marry again if she wanted to; for although the mere thought of it nearly broke his heart, he wished her, above all, to be happy, and to have some one to love her and protect her from the storms of the rude world. Then he and Mrs. Keyser and the children cried, and Keyser, as a closing word of counsel, advised her not to plough for corn earlier than the middle of March.
On the night of the 13th of September there was a flood in the creek, and Keyser got up at four o'clock in the morning of the 14th and worked until night, trying to save his buildings and his woodpile. He was so busy that he forgot all about its being the day of his death; and as he was very tired, he went to bed early and slept soundly all night.
About six o'clock on the morning of the 15th there was a ring at the door-bell. Keyser jumped out of bed, threw up the front window and exclaimed,
"Who's there?"
"It's me—Toombs," said the undertaker.
"What do you want at this time of the morning?" demanded Keyser.
"Want?" said Toombs, not recognizing Keyser. "Why, I've brought around the ice to pack Keyser in, so's he'll keep until the funeral. The corpse'd spoil this kind of weather if we didn't."
Then Keyser remembered, and it made him feel angry when he thought how the day had passed and left him still alive, and how he had made a fool of himself. So he said,