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